Finding Our Way

Transcript This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Apologies for any mistakes. Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,  Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way,  Peter: Navigating the opportunities  Jesse: and challenges  Peter: of design and design leadership,  Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us to talk about what’s next for digital product design is John Cutler, veteran product manager and product management consultant. Along the way, we’ll discuss what product leaders know that design leaders don’t, facing ambiguity and uncertainty from executives, and how design leaders can more effectively advocate for the true value of their team’s work. Peter: John, thank you for joining us. We usually start by having our guests explain a little bit about what they do. And, in particular, in your case, I think that’s important because Jesse and I were saying right before you got on, like, we’re trying to track the narrative of your career arc but maybe you could just walk us through what you’re about, where you’ve been, and where you are now, or what you’re doing now. John: Sure. Yeah, I’ll give the quick story. Dropped out of college, had a video game company. I made a bartending CD-ROM game called Last Call. It’s like when you shipped games on a CD-ROM..  Jesse: Yay, physical media. John: And then I slipped into playing music. And touring with different bands, which is a lot of fun, and then sort of picked up more and more tech type jobs over the years you know, like adtech. And I worked at a company that literally took PDF catalogs and made them into flipping page catalogs. That was a thing at the time that was, yeah, there’s probably a lot of good UX lessons in that. And then I got involved in B2B SaaS company. So software as a service companies and a range of companies from Zendesk and Appfolio and a company called Amplitude, where I actually was a product evangelist, where it was, I mean, I basically lucked into this crazy role at a company that fit my personality, where I like thinking about this stuff and I’m curious and I like teaching and I like packaging the things I’m doing as a product. And I was this product evangelist at Amplitude. And that put me in touch with teams really from around the world, you know, hundreds of teams, I forget the number, but we maybe did, you know, a thousand one-on-ones with product leaders and met with hundreds of teams along the way. So at, by that point, I had done some product management, UX research, then I was this product evangelist role. Then I did this product enablement role at a company called Toast. And here I am today. And that’s it, you know, UX research, product management, working in New York City and doing tech with that before it was called product management and just doing stuff and music. And so yeah, pretty across the board, but there are some through lines. But that’s generally where I’m coming from.  John’s distinct drive Peter: As you were sharing, I was thinking about how I have gotten to know you, which is primarily through your voluminous engagement on LinkedIn. And you are always someone, kind of, processing conversations that you’re having with folks, things that you’re seeing, you’ve got your newsletter, you’re often posting and we’ll get to the content of that in a moment.  But before then, I’m wondering, what is your drive? Like what, if you had like a personal mission or a purpose statement or something that’s kind of underlying all of this, that’s driving this questing kind of behavior, that at least, as I witness it. John: We could probably go way back to childhood for that one. I mean, it is sort of funny. There was a school play, I think it was second grade, and the teacher, it was called Vernacular Island. She wrote the play called Vernacular Island, and I was the question mark. Jesse: Wow. You were branded early. John: I was branded very, very early. It’s like they got through all the letters with Cutler. Cutler, the question mark, you know. It’s funny because I always want to go back and find who the exclamation mark was. It’s probably the CEO of a company or something. Jesse: Wow. John: You know, so this goes back a long way. I think it’s a combination of being curious, working things through in writing, seeking to understand, and seeking some level of coherence from what I’m seeing.  Yeah, a lot of it is actually thinking through writing. I mean, if I had done it all over again, I would have taken more careful notes on what I was seeing and probably written less. I didn’t need to think in public as much as I’ve been doing probably over these years and putting it out there. It’s been pretty time consuming to be honest.  But that’s generally what’s driven me. You know, I get, I get these… I’m curious about something. I have these open questions that I’m trying to think through either in my personal life or my personal professional life, or more broadly, the sort of zeitgeist of things. I mean, working at Amplitude, one day would be Amazon and Intercom and then some bank and then some plumbing supply company. And then some company that was going to do massive layoffs, another company hiring 10,000 people. And that just leaves you with tons of questions. I mean, just one day like that will leave you scratching your head for months, right? And that’s generally what you’re seeing as I work through this stuff. The variability of product management Jesse: That’s interesting because I think that for a lot of the design leaders who listen to this podcast, the vantage point that they have is so narrow because they are operating within their role, within their vertical, within their market context. Peter and I were actually just talking about this the other day, the way that our experience as consultants required us, I think, to do a different level of sort of pattern-matching. My sense is that although you do have a design background, you’ve been really focused on the product management side of the fence and the problems that exist in that space. And there are a lot of problems that exist in that space that are just simply unfamiliar to the design folks in our audience, despite the fact that they are engaging every day with the people who are directly trying to solve these problems. And so I guess that’s the first thing that I wonder about is, What are you noticing broadly these days about what’s going on with product management that might be really hard for design leaders to actually have a view into? I know that’s a really big question. Mm John: Yeah, I, yeah. Let’s, let’s first acknowledge the diversity of contexts out there. I think that’s really important. So even when we believe we have deep or broad context, it’s usually not nearly as deep as one other person or as broad as the next person. You know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley are like, “I worked at 15 companies in the Valley.” And you’re like, “Yes, you’ve worked at 15 companies in the Valley.” It’s actually still pretty narrow or, you know, I’ve definitely observed that product management is both decades old and years old in some ways. So one thing when you’re observing product management, I was speaking with a design leader recently and they just couldn’t make sense of it. They said, you know, I don’t get this. I mean, we’re… design community, we figured these things out for a long time now and I don’t get product. They seem so wishy-washy at the moment. I mean, they seem like the weak link at the moment.  And I think what’s kind of funny is, that people, if you go to a consumer goods company, for example, they have product managers, the product manager owns a clothing line or a shoe line. I have a friend who works at Deckers here in Santa Barbara, Hoka, their shoes. There’s a PM for that. Pretty defined areas of responsibility for them to do that. They own the P and L for that particular product. They have partners in engineering, the people who make the shoes. They have people in design, the people who design the shoes, right? There’s an understanding of how that thing works.  And I was chatting with them about the problems in the product space. And they’re like, this makes no sense to me. Like, we figured this out. I don’t understand why things are so wishy-washy in software at the moment. So what we were reflecting on when I was talking to this design leader is that certainly some things that we’re doing now, some companies were doing 20 years ago, but there’ve been massive changes at the same time in ways of working. I mean, I was speaking to someone the other day and I said, “Have you ever worked at a company where you could deliver something in days or hours?” He’s like, “Days or hours? No. I mean, it takes months to get anything done, right.” I said, “Oh, now take your skills and mash that against doing things in days and hours.” “Oh, wow. Okay. That’s different.”  Or another example during, you know, the, this zero interest rates thing. Imagine being at a company that’s not yet public, that suddenly has decided to have 10 products and 10 GMs and decide it’s a software as a service, but everything’s multi-product and you have to interact with finance and people say, well, these PMs don’t seem to have their shit figured out. Yeah. Tell me how many times in history, a company that’s five-to-10 years old has 10 products, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and there’s that much pressure and there’s investor pressure and it’s growing that fast.  So then I was talking to the design leader, they’re looking at the site, like it just seems so disorganized. Like, couldn’t they have figured this out? I think design was so much better in 2013. We had it all figured out then.  And I was like, well, yeah, you had it figured out at the bank you were working at then. And you know what, the bank you’re working at then is not working all that different 11 years later, realistically. But now run ways things were working through the ringer. And someone made this point, I was looking at Reddit, and they were talking about Marty Kagan. And they said, you know, yeah, Marty Kagan worked at eBay when eBay was the only marketplace in the world, and he worked at Netscape when it was the only browser in the world. And, but I think there’s something very telling in that example, right? We could look back at those ways of working or Ben Horowitz or any of those and say, we had product figured out in the Valley in the mid 2000s. See, it was… We were doing it. It’s not acknowledging the rate of change and the diversity of situations that exist that PMs are finding themselves in. And so I think that’s what a lot of people miss, and folks who are not on the product side miss. But frankly, I think the same thing’s happening in design. I said to the designer recently, “Have you worked with a modern design system such that developers and designers could collaborate in real time on, almost everything they’ve done?” “Oh, no, no, no. I thought a design system was just, you know, our pattern library.”  “Yeah, but have you ever worked with an active pattern library that allowed you to prototype in real time together?”  “No, never worked with that. How would that work?”  “Look, you can even go in and change the CSS yourself in this library.” “Really? I can make pull requests?” “Yes.” Mind blown. Like, wow, collaboration would be so much fun if I was working like that.  And so you just see, it’s just a very diverse set of experiences and swirl in the world. And I think that that’s one challenge. When you look at the LinkedIn idea-sphere or what people are sort of hot taking about product at the moment, it sort of removes context from it. The fact that some companies are operating like it’s 2004 and some are operating like it’s 2024. And there’s a huge mix and mash of what’s going on in the industry at the moment. And so I think that’s what makes it difficult for folks to wrap their head around what’s happening. Peter: So I totally agree., I’ve seen this and I think… There’s a phrase context collapse, which applies… John: Yeah. Peter: …to, social media in this regard. I’ve had conversations recently with Kristina Halvorson around the world of content, because what happens is you have content strategists and content designers, and they use a lot of the same language and don’t realize that their contexts are totally different. One tends to be much more marketing-oriented or kind of big, lots of words, content oriented, and the other is product-oriented and much more aligned with product design than it is with content strategy, but they both use the word “content.” They’ll say similar things around style guides or whatever and then not realize they’re talking past each other.  But i’m wondering, then, because I think you, particularly given your opportunity at Amplitude, we’re able to engage across more organizations than most individuals, like, maybe, analyst companies would be the only ones, you know, your Forresters or whatever, who were similarly like every day they’re talking to a new company. And I guess my question for you is, Is it a continuous spectrum of diversity and variety, or are there categories? Is there 10 types of organizations, 20 types of organizations, still might be big but a manageable set, or is it, you know what, like, don’t even go there. It’s more of this smear of what all is going on and you just kind of have to meet each company where they’re at. John: So one of the funny things about this is that when people have deep experience in one context, they tend to extrapolate that context to all contexts. So they think they’ve figured out the first principles of the world, right?  However, when you’ve, when you’ve worked with a bunch of different contexts, you also fool yourself. You think that you see the patterns of everything that goes across the world. And my friend Josh Arnold has this great quote, like the reverse Anna Karenina principle, where you start, like, detecting anti-patterns. So Anna Karenina said, You know, dysfunctional families are all different and happy families are the same,” you know, and it was like, well, actually successful companies are all different and the anti-patterns are the same. So when you look across companies, you tend to be like, aha, look at that. They’ve got too much work in progress. I’m a genius. I noticed the pattern, but what you find out is like, yeah, no shit. You know, every company has that problem. Even the companies that are successful have too much work in progress to do those things. I do think that you end up with some clusters. Or at least meaningful clusters. And the ones that I ended up in a lot of cases were, you know, I’ll just give you a real world example.  Like at Amplitude, we had sort of five or six categories of companies and some were just very rapid scale-up we call the digital product native, but literally they sold a digital product. You pay for that thing. And you could divide that into B2C or B2B, but these also tended to be world-scale companies like a Figma or a Miro, these were just very rapid scale-up native sort of digital product selling companies.  And then you start to get into the earlier B2B SaaS companies, maybe launched in the mid-2000’s or even earlier, and they’re on their second or third act. They’re more stable companies. They’re public.  And then you got these massive world-scale brands like an IKEA, LEGO, or world brand like an Adidas. And they’re now embracing the sort of digital surface areas for what they’re doing, but they’re sort of world-scale. And then you start to get into more complex healthcare and very sort of detailed non-digital product selling companies, which I sort of called service ecologies. I mean, they really were like a product… You could fool yourself that everything’s a product, but at that point, I don’t even care about using the word product. They’re just very interesting things. I could probably add one or two more onto that, but I think that , if we thought about what are the variables. How old is the company? Did they take a leap of faith by selling the thing that they built, like the digital product, or did they make their money somewhere else? Very, very important example for that. A massive brand, like a shoe company, is only going to afford one to 5 percent of their revenue on tech spend. So when people complain about this sort of centralized IT model for those companies, it’s literally baked into the business plan. They don’t have a lot of money left over. They thrived because they had centralized digital group that would do stuff for them. And so it’s very easy to point at those companies and say they might be behind, or you’re not Figma. Like Adidas, why can’t you be like Figma? There’s a huge reason. Like Figma sells Figma. Jesse: Yes. Yeah. John: It’s sort of like, how old is the company? Did they sell a digital product? Did they start with a centralized IT model? And there are some regional differences in companies, and then you could sort of do subdivisions from that. And that gets to a lot of the themes that you’re talking about. You know, B2B, vertical SaaS or horizontal SaaS are all subcategories from there. Peter: This kind of dovetails with the hypothesis I have that I’ll bounce off you, which is… So functions like design and engineering travel more completely between these types of organizations, right? How a designer performs at Meta is how they are going to perform at Workday is how they’re going to perform at Chase Bank. They’re going to kind of do a lot of the same stuff. And same thing with engineering.  Whereas product doesn’t travel, right? Like maybe 50%, maybe it’s even a third because the nature of the product practice or the product function is so specific to that organization it’s in. And I’m just wondering, one, if you see that as well, and then, two, what do you make of that? Because one of the challenges that we hear all the time from designers, you know, being more design oriented, is a frustration in working with product. And if it’s because, like, the person you mentioned earlier, like we’d kind of figured it out in design 10, 20 years ago.  We know how to work, why doesn’t product? And it’s maybe because of this variability. So what do you counsel then in terms of navigating these relationships, if product is that much more variable. Product, Design, and Engineering John: You know, I wanted to go back to one thing I said there about the sort of centralized IT model. When I think about that model and you think about how designers could look back two decades ago or engineers who could look back a while ago, I think a lot of that comes from the fact that those centralized models sort of allowed that stability, you know, it was the business, and tech. Business and tech, or the business and IT, and I think you’re exactly right, because if we think that product either sits on one side or maybe sits on the other side, or maybe get squashed into the middle, that explains why the role is very, very sensitive to the overall business model of the company or the culture of the company. I mean, engineering leaders also have this frustration. They do, as well, frankly, a lot of the most interesting things in org design at the moment, and collaborating with design and thinking about systems thinking and thinking about ecosystems and platforms are coming from engineering and design. They’re not coming from product, right? So Product is still sort of sitting there in that sort of weird business- tech overlap to do things. So, I mean, other than design leaders understanding that, Hey, it’s not all figured out and B, product in this company is having to adapt to the particular model, whereas maybe you’ve already accustomed yourself to being adaptable.  So, you kind of know how to adapt the practice of design in these contexts. Maybe just the empathy is a good start, but here’s another thing I would urge design leaders to do. And I was meeting a great… last week, a great design leader from Google, and he was talking about an effort they had done in Google around Google Maps. One thing that we discovered is that there’s still this problem that design comes in and comes out with what I would call their functional models. You know, we’re going to work in terms of journeys. We’re going to work in terms of X, or we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to operate design.  John: And engineering is often coming up with their systems to think about their work. And meanwhile, in this group in Google, the product team had their own model, thinking about it in terms of engagement or thinking about these sort of business metrics or thinking what they can do. So one thing that all design leaders can do is to maybe resist the immediate temptation to sort of go back to your functional camp, pick your models, like we’re going to work in terms of journeys, we’re going to work in terms of whatever it is, jobs to be done, we’re going to work in terms of scenarios. Product is going to do its businessy thing over there.  One thing I did at Amplitude, and I’m not saying frameworks are a dime a dozen, but one of the things we did was this framework called the North Star framework. One of the things it sought to do was to try to bring design and product and engineering together to a sort of a common model, and way of working to align.  So I call this like the functional model trap where design leader comes in. They have got 90 days. They figure out their group. They figure out, we’re going to work in terms of journeys and X, Y, Z, A, B, C. Product’s off doing their thing. Engineers off doing their thing. This goes on for two or three years. And then the design leader wonders why they kind of quote unquote lost their seat at the table.  It’s because the business got frustrated with all three functions and just decided to go over the top of them and come up with some framework that doesn’t work, right. So I think you have to reach out and try to forge a common model versus getting kind of too seduced by your functional models. Jesse: That’s, that’s a very interesting point of view, I think, because a lot of the design leaders that I work with in my coaching practice I think really feel kind of cornered. And they feel cornered especially by the power that is invested in product as a function. That it is perceived to somehow have the inside line on some operational insight that is going to drive the ultimate model that everybody operates by. And I think that for a lot of design leaders, the sense is that if you don’t show up with your own model, you’re going to get slotted into somebody else’s and the outcomes that you’re trying to drive and the success criteria that you and your team have been optimized toward, you’re not going to be set up to deliver those things. So I wonder your thoughts on, on how design leaders address that. John: Yeah. I wrote this post around the functional model trap, which offers some ideas. But I think that the summary there is you need to cross the aisle and see where the common ground is. A great example of this is journeys. You may have already had them on the podcast or will, but I worked with the design leader, Jehad at Toast, and he was great about just doubling down on a model that’s called journeys, a model that had a lot of salience across the organization, had a lot of salience with our customer support team, and had a lot of salience with product to a degree. And he doubled down on that particular model. So one thing is just, pick models that have salience in your company and make sure that you’re explaining to the product leaders why it makes sense to think about this and how it can be helpful, et cetera. So that would be number one. I think the number two is, look to engineering, because… This is fascinating to me. All the org design stuff happening in engineering now, trying to sort of refactor the orgs so they can move faster and be more customer-centric, that will ultimately define a lot of the ways design works and can work and how quickly you can ship and how fast you can learn and the feedback loops in your company. It’s amazing to me that there are architects in engineering doing something called event storming. There’s other forms of domain mapping. There’s behavior driven design. There’s all these techniques they’re using to basically figure out how to structure the architecture and structure the teams, essentially, that have massive implications for design. And I’ve brought a designer into an event storming activity. And the designer said. This is the best journey mapping activity I’ve ever done. Does it help engineers? The engineers are like, yes, this absolutely helps us. And product is sitting there like, wow, I guess if it helps both of you, why didn’t we have this conversation earlier to be able to do it? So that’s the second thing. Don’t underestimate what engineering is doing in these efforts, because it may have a huge impact on how you can work later on. And a lot of great work is happening in engineering around that.  Now, there’s a lot of acceptance of socio technical systems. There’s a lot of acceptance of the need to reduce cognitive load. There’s interesting sense-making frameworks like team topologies. And other mapping type frameworks that are very familiar to designers. Like the capabilities are there in language that they can understand. And that’s a huge, huge opportunity. So that would be number two.  And I think that number three is, wow, if you could work with product, and I’ve seen it happen where you acknowledge, not to get too nerdy, but there’s three fundamental model types. There’s capability model types, journey model types, and flywheel or business model type flywheel types. Product tends to own the business model flywheels. Design says they’re going to stake claim on the journey type things with a bit of capabilities and engineering wants capabilities ’cause they think that’s what they’re going to need to build an architect around.  There’s so many opportunities to find common ground for that, or at least surface those models and work together with them. And so that would be the third thing, is seek the opportunities to jump over the aisle and integrate those frameworks together. The Google leader that I spoke about they did just that, you know, they really aligned around a journey, but then products started layering in their KPIs and other things in that framework and they were successful from doing that. Jesse: I think one of the biggest breakdowns in here is how product perceives what design is there to do, and what design is there deliver, and what their partnership actually entails between the two of them and, and what they were there to negotiate and what they’re there to stand for, honestly, as partners, and I’m curious about your thoughts about that, about how that fits in with everything you’ve just now been talking about, because I think this is so important for design leaders to understand how they are being perceived from the other side of the aisle, right? John: Yeah, and this goes to that weird aspect of experience, and sort of depths experience. So you meet this product leader and they’ve worked at maybe even these famous companies. And the first word they’re saying to you is, you know, where’s that Figma file or something, right? And you’re like, Oh God. And so I think that the first part is realizing even people with deep experience may not have had the opportunity to work directly with a designer who cared about the overall company strategy and could help shape the product strategy, so be empathetic at first, they might not have had that opportunity to work closely with designers to do that.  And I think that the second thing is, in many organizations, things are so reactive and there’s so many fires. The idea that there’s any time to think. I’ve seen a lot of design leaders get a lot of success by just putting, investing their social capital and finding some space to slow down. And they don’t see the other 30 meetings that these product managers in or look at their calendars and to do these things, and see how scattered a lot of these PMs are. I mean, their calendars, their minds are just very scattered. I heard in many cases. And so I think that by carving out that time, like a couple days of deep work together and moving through these things, or maybe inviting engineering to do some of these sort of more domain-oriented or architectural activities at the same time, that can be huge.  But I go back to my, I worked at a company here called Appfolio, where I was a UX researcher and it just will stick with me my whole career. You’re in this thing, you’re doing some form of participatory design. The designer is… their mind is sort of semi being blown by these engineers, not necessarily being great designers, but surfacing really, really interesting possibilities that technology can do. The product manager is just blown away by everyone. And then the engineers are like, wow, okay, that’s why you are paid to be a designer. At the end of the day, so that kind of working side by side in those activities, I’ll just always remember how the mutual respect meter just went through the roof.  Instead of talking and telling we were doing together. And I’ve never seen that level of just mutual respect and admiration. Just even two days of doing that just goes through the roof. And it lasted for years. I still think about it. Peter: Taking from what you were just talking about in terms of product design, engineering, collaborating closely together, that raises a couple of things. One, it sounds like at Appfolio you had a healthy collaborative environment, whereas many environments inadvertently discourage that kind of collaboration because each function is supposed to own something. And what do I own if my work is just being done together as a team?  But then the other thread that I’m unpacking here is around the role of product. So, one of the things that I’ve started to say more and more is: sufficiently senior UXers with a particular orientation should probably just become product people, right? And, I think there’s some relationship between that kind of like almost pragmatic recognition of like, yes, there’s these functions that each have their responsibilities, but really it’s a group of people just trying to get something done. So navigating teams versus individuals and then navigating how you move between these different functions. Curious your thoughts. John: Yeah, well, a couple thoughts is that first, this is about national cultures and regional cultures as well. So you know, realistically, like in the valley, in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot more distinction between the roles.  You know, it’s this sort of product designer persona. Yeah. We’re gonna bring this person in there, you know, we hire these rockstar engineers that ,they just want these other people to own it because that’s why they’re going to get their promotion if they own it. And I was talking to a friend at a company in the Valley and they said, well, engineer and designer looked at the PM and said, “Idea rejected, not going to do it. It’s not going to help us.” You know, so they had the autonomy, they had the power in these organizations to go back to the PM and say, sorry, you haven’t given us enough data or evidence about why this is going to work and it’s not going to help us, I’m not going to get promoted off of that, you know, this promotion driven development and design, I call it in some sense but it works. A new model for product development organization John: Not sure, you know, maybe it works in some settings, but it works in those cultures. So anyway, I’m trying to acknowledge that there is a, you know, a world scale of collaboration and individualism spreading things that probably impacts a bit of that. But I share your theory. I think that in the next 10 years, you’re going to see the following model emerge in some companies. There will be groups of 30 to 50 people with one product manager, one sort of design lead for the whole group. A pod of insights. Insights will include UX research, quantitative, quant, qual, analytics, data science. So there’s a pod with an operations team that might have a subgroup of design ops and product ops, but generally operations. And so research ops will merge into that.  I think 30 to 50 people is probably the maximum boundary of contained trust you can have in a pseudo remote world, where you can build trust around 30 to 50 people. I think in person, it could probably be more, but there’s a kind of size limit to that. It’s not going to be more than three levels of hierarchy. You’ve got to keep it pretty flat and efficient.  And then I think what you will find is you will find 30 to 50 engineers and designers, maybe five, 10 designers, and then the rest engineers. And I think that they’re going to function, that there’ll be 1 PM for that group. And the reason why I think that is exactly to what you’re saying is, I think people are going to come to the conclusion that a product-savvy engineering lead and a designer are perfectly capable in those environments for, for leading.  All this idea, and whatever we could say it came from the agile world, but it just came from a period of time for a couple of decades where someone decided that every group of three to five people needs a PM or a PO or something like that. And so now we assigned all those people and we called everything a product. Everything is not a product. Everything is not a product.  So I think that this, honestly, we’re going to see this pendulum swing because there’s so much hype around products right now, the next three to whatever many years are going to be all these huge companies calling everything a product only to realize what the B2B SaaS companies are realizing right now, which is no, not everything is a product. And maybe for the design leaders here, think ahead, let’s say that I’m right. Think ahead to how that might change your role. Do you want to be that person who sits to the side of that PM and then has a five to 10 people reporting to you? Do you want to be one of those people there? Do you want to sit across the whole organization, across multiple pods of 30 to 50 people? I don’t know, but if, let’s say if my theory is right, you’d have to think about what that would mean for your role. Jesse: Yeah. I think what you’re describing is a reshaping of the value proposition, both of the product lead role, as well as the design lead role.  I want to bring your research background back into this, because I wonder where research fits into the mix here, because it seems to sit in this really, actually really important strategic space between design and product in informing the choices that both functions make. John: Yeah, the research first, I feel so much the pain that the research community is going through at the moment. I do sort of feel as someone involved in the product space that there’s this, I would say it’s an unintentional gaslighting that’s happened for researchers around this kind of weird product discovery stuff and this research stuff. And having been a researcher myself and PM, maybe I have the privilege of being more pragmatic. I’m like, yeah, I could just go either way. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I noticed for a lot of people, it really does matter what these titles are and what their boundaries and spheres of influence are in the organization  You know, at Amplitude, I dealt with a lot of analysts, like analytics people, and it’s amazing the similarities between your average analytics employee and a researcher. Day in, day out, they’re called in to be pulled to like… Can we have a dashboard for that? C -uite needs a new dashboard for that. They’re like, damn it, but there’s strategic insights that could be saving the company right now. Why do you have me making a dashboard for the deck again? Just do it, go and do that.  The data quality is often really, really messy. They’re having to fix it, just like a researcher is having to figure out this fire hose of qualitative data and what they’re going to do with it. There’s so many similarities, but in both of those cases, there was… A couple questions.  Pull versus push. Am I just pulled in, am I “as a service,” am I research as a service, or am I strategic insights as a service, or am I a question answer as a service? You know, are we data snacking or on a good data diet? The same thing with UX research. Are we, are we research snacking or are we on a good research diet to do things? That’s why I think that, I mean, first of all, it’s hard to be a researcher, but I think that if we just extrapolate all these ideas, something’s got to give eventually. And the scenario I gave you, the idea that you are elevating insights, both the quant and qual side of that, like, does it matter whether they have a leader that sits right to the side of the PM lead, the engineering leader, whatever? I don’t know, or maybe that doesn’t matter as much, but I think that there’s going to have to be some acknowledgement that quant and qual and these things to improve decision-making and sort of strategic sense are going to have to have some kind of first class place in this particular model. In other words, it might be more centralized than people would like, but the size of the groups might be smaller and more containable, which might make it a better role for those people At Amplitude, you would find some companies with one quantitative analyst per 150 people, yet at a place like Canva or another place, you might find an analyst per every 10 people. You’d find a UXR for every 15 or 23 people. And so those ratios have to come down in my mind for it to be pulled into less of a data snacking type role. And so I’m just trying to think of the physics of the problem. 30 to 50 people, then you can start having a group of people who feel they’re empowered and are driving strategy versus running around and playing whack-a-mole all day. Peter: With the 30 to 50 people thing, your hypothesis or proposal that you only need one product leader over a group that large, Melissa Perr i actually said something very similar a few years ago when she was on our show. She was also reacting to basically what happened with agile transformations and, we needed to have thousands of POs, product owners, and now it’s becoming clear that those people aren’t adding much value.  What I’m wondering though, and, I’m buying into your vision, right? As my wheels are turning, I think it solves a lot of problems that remain when everything is a group of six to eight people, right? Your two-pizza team can only do so much. John: it’s like we’re talking about thousands of people or five people. There has to be some unit of size that’s between six and fifteen hundred. Jesse: Yes.  Peter: And that led to some of the thinking in the Org Design for Design Orgs book, where we had design teams of about six people working across what at the time were multiple squads, each with six to eight people, but if you could just take that design team of five or six people and plug them in and say, you know, they’re just part of this group of 30 to 50 people doing work together, the interface is clear. You’re saying it with some degree of confidence, which I appreciate, but, that’s leading me to wonder, are you witnessing this happening anywhere? Are there early signs? I’m just curious, like, what have you seen in terms of companies trying to operate, I think of the 30 to 50 feral hogs on Twitter, in this group of 30 to 50, with a product manager and a pretty robust suite of capabilities. Then you get product, you get engineering, you get design, you get insights and analytics, you get content, you get data, whereas when everything is eight people, you miss out on so many functions. Anyways how confident are you in this as a direction? And what is your evidence? John: Well, let’s… Here’re the signals that I see.  One, the pressure to flatten the orgs out. You’re seeing many companies just eliminate a whole level of management. So, if before everyone was thinking you need a PM for every seven people, someone is asking that question now at the moment. Well, what, if you had a PM for more?  So that’s, one, the ratio thing. Two, way, way, way more roles open right now for principal or staff PM than there are for junior PM. So there’s some acknowledgement now that having a bunch of junior PMs running around the org doesn’t help the teams, doesn’t help designers. That, like, one senior or staff or more experienced PM can, can drive the coherence necessary for a lot more people than just six people. So that’s the second theme that you’re seeing there.  The third, I think that comes along with that is you’re seeing the insights roles start to talk more about things like this, right? Like, isn’t this just insights and decision support? Like, isn’t this just a coherent thing? Should we be drawing these boundaries? Why?  Imagine you are an analyst, you feel a little marginalized. Imagine your UX research and you feel a little marginalized. You look at your fellow marginalized people and you say, you know what? We’re kind of doing the same thing here. Wouldn’t it be great if we just joined forces here? So I think someone in that thread actually said that. So that’s like another signal.  And then I think what you’re seeing in organizations is like the beginning of this, right? So you’re seeing, you know, these changes and reorg starting to happen, but I could be completely wrong. And one thing that we know for sure is it just takes forever for the industry to do anything, right?  So, even if some org started moving in this direction now, it might take a while for it to work itself out. And maybe in more stable domains, that number could be bigger, maybe in very rapidly changing domains, zero-to-one type situations, it’s way smaller. You know, there could be a lot of variations of this, but I think it’s more helpful for us as like a thought experiment to tease out some of the, like, the zeitgeist issues at the moment. Making space for holistic vision Jesse: It’s interesting to frame this in terms of the way that the design community has talked about itself and its own value proposition over the last, I don’t know, 20 years or so, because you know, we’ve been on this march toward the C-level, where the idea was that if you could create more, more centralized, more executive, more higher-level strategic leadership over design as a function, that would have a kind of cascade effect in terms of business value, in terms of product and user outcomes, all the things that we all love to see. What you’re suggesting doesn’t really create a space for that. And I’m wondering about, like, where does holistic vision sit? Because I feel like that was like the promise, right? The promise was everybody would be aligning to some kind of holistic experiential vision for the product or the offering or whatever, and we could all feel really confident that we were doing something that meant something as opposed to running off in a million different directions. So I wonder, yeah. What are your thoughts there? John: Well, I think this is one of the things that many companies have realized is that the cascade, especially during times of a lot of incoherence and dissonance and rapid change, just creates fog.  I don’t want to talk too much about the military, but in the military, they have something called mission command, and Stephen Bungay wrote a great book called Art of Action which tries to take those ideas and basically determines that, like, Andy Grove’s idea of cascaded goals and cascaded context, It’s just a version of the military’s mission command.  Now, mission command believes in these frontline teams that are autonomous and that, you know, you cascade context and then they cascade feedback and magically it’s going to work out. I was talking to an SVP the other day and they’re like, I have no idea what’s happening in my company. It’s so incoherent. I’m only dealing in these broad strokes. I have no idea what’s happening on the front lines. I’m being told by leaders, I need to get into the details. I’m not even sure the details I’m supposed to get into. And things are just… I’m sitting in this, in theory, exalted role, that I should be able to have all this impact, and it’s just too murky and too foggy at the moment with all the changes that we’re seeing.  But I guess what I’m observing is you have to be able to translate that overarching context to action somewhat effectively. And I think that what a lot of these large organizations are experiencing are actually their strategy has changed, but their org structure and architecture have not changed yet.  So the company, for example, now believes that the end-to-end experience is important. They hired in the chief digital person to make sure the end-to-end experience is important. And, literally was on a call the other day where someone said this, like we went through that, we were all bought in. And then we realized we have teams of 250 people and someone had a great model the other day, they called kebab orgs and cake orgs. A kebab org is like a kebab is the journey, you know, like a journey based teams and a cake is. You know, you’ve, got these layers…  Jesse: yeah.  John: …and it was kind of an interesting analogy that like, there’s a certain physics to the problem. So you get this design leader coming in with the aspiration and the mandate to create these consistencies. The strategy has changed. They’re thinking about the bank in terms of end-to-end experiences. They’re thinking about the consistency, but the architecture and the org design hasn’t caught up to the point where you could do that in any meaningful way, with teams working effectively to do that.  And so I think what I’m talking about is not a challenge against that idea, but I’m thinking like, say you were the CDO or whoever, and you did have these sort of pods of groups that had at least some sort of domain focus or maybe owned a journey or maybe owned, they’re big enough to do something meaningful. I mean, like with 50 people, you can do something pretty meaningful. I wonder whether that would give them more ability to actually act on their aspirations for consistency versus just talking about vision in theory.  Look to engineering Peter: You just mentioned how strategy has changed, but the org structures haven’t necessarily caught up yet. And that’s leading me actually back to something you were saying, where you mentioned how engineering has been refactoring. This seems to be a trend that you are witnessing. I’m not exposed to engineering and engineering teams much, so I don’t know what the trends are over there, but you mentioned how they were refactoring so they can be more customer responsive. Architecture using new techniques like event storming, STS, those types of things.  If this is a trend in engineering, what is that in response to? Where are we at in the arc of this? Is this happening industry-wide or is it like a crossing the chasm, only the leaders are doing this right now? Help unpack that a bit more. John: it’s happening industry- wide. So, I would highly recommend any design leader to join Gene Kim’s community, which is the enterprise leadership community. He wrote an amazing book called Wiring The Winning Organization. Gene’s community are the CTOs. These are the, engineering leaders of these organizations. What’s fascinating about that community is the level of dialogue. Now we’re like, again, we’re talking about. How can we reduce cognitive loads so that people could actually get anything done? Are we aligning our architecture around customer domains? The driver there is speed, but it is customer centricity to be able to do that. Also, if you’re a design leader and you don’t know necessarily about the engineering side, if you get this wrong, or these things are incongruent, all the pressure to design everything up front or all the inability to experiment or all the inability to research and spend time in divergent thing is probably driven by the fact that nothing is happening because there are thousands of dependencies. So when there’s thousands of dependencies, the only way to get something done is to turn it into a big ass project. Jesse: right. John: And run it like an old school IT project. So a lot of the drivers for this in Gene Kim’s book, it’s, like, slowification is one of his things. Like, how can we actually slow down to be making better decisions? How can we have lower cognitive load? How can we have time for deep work? How can we do these things?  And I think that that’s, what’s driving that group and that community. It’s controversial, but I would say there were more that will impact the designer’s lives coming from the engineering stuff that’s happening at the moment, then it’s happening in the weirdo product world.  Product world’s always going to be a weird place. So I’ll give the why it’s so critical to be collaborating. If you don’t get designers involved in these activities to refactor the architecture and think about the need and the journeys and the customer needs, you’re going to come up with the engineer’s view of what the customer domain is. For example, you imagine a company that’s trying to fix the problem of auto body shops. If you just tell an engineer, Hey, guess what? We need to rearchitect our architecture around the jobs of an auto body shop. What are they going to do? If you’re, I’m just being all, I’m being friendly to engineers here. Unless they do these activities like event storming, you know, the things are gonna go like, well, an auto body shop is a formula. You know, you’ve got to bring the car and you’ve got to fix it. They’re going to think about it in very mechanical terms. That’s what an auto body shop does.  John: If you as a design leader don’t get involved in that activity and say, no, let’s start considering the domain here. let’s start considering the journeys across an auto body shop, or who are you really serving? It’s actually parents instead of, you know, hot rod drivers or whatever. The critical thing is, if it takes three years to ship anything, you know, the world will have changed around you and all your great research and wonderful designs will be obsolete by the time that team gets that thing done. So I think that’s important. Jesse: Yeah.  Peter: Is this a recognition that agile transformation failed? ‘Cause part of me is like, weren’t these engineers, the one who advocated agile transformations, which are causing the problems that we’re all on now trying to unwind? John: No, no, no. so this is what folks need to understand is that you know, Agile circa mid two thousands, was a group of people who were not selling anything necessarily, right? They were literally like this podcast, right? These are the people, if you go back, there’s something called the C2wiki, which is this old, like agile wiki. If you see the depth of conversation on that thing about challenging the norms of what they’re doing, the first “agile is dead” post came out in 2005. That community is way ahead of this. They’re 20 years ahead of that particular thing. And so folks like Martin Fowler and other folks who, you know, Kent Beck, kind of distance themselves from the, this agile industrial complex that’s happened. Design also has its industrial complex.  You know, it’s the CX industrial complex, just buy all these tools and you’ll be set. You know, you’ll be a great design leader, customer 360. You know, there’s all kinds of, everyone has an industrial complex to do stuff.  I think that the challenge was agile was local by design. It was about teams. Small teams doing work and that was a feature, not a bug. The idea of scale at the scale we deal at in these organizations was just a non-topic. And that was part of what made it special. And so you see what I would say is these things like SAFe are almost institutionalized incoherence. You know, so, SAFe isn’t saying, by the way, you’re not going to be doing Safe in a year. Like if you keep refactoring what you’re doing, it’s, Oh, guess what? We’ve got 3000 people with tons of dependencies and somehow we have to get those 3000 people to ship anything in the next six months or the next three months to do things.  So I think that, like, Gene’s community these architects, these people are thinking in terms of socio-technical systems, are definitely at the right spot at the right time to deal with the challenge of the moment. And it’s not an indictment of the agile community to do it. It’s just, it was never really part of that problem thinking on that particular scale to do it. Acquiring influence Jesse: In my coaching work, I’ve worked with a lot of design leaders for whom it’s so hard just to know what to advocate for… John: yeah. Jesse: Where to push, what ideas to champion, what things to let go of, what is the actual path forward that is going to drive them toward fulfilling, you know, the vision that they have for what design can bring to organizations. And so I’m wondering from your vantage point, acknowledging that we’re painting the entire industry with a very broad brush, what are the things that can help design leaders prioritize what they advocate for and where potentially they can turn to these fellow travelers for support?  John: Huge thought that comes from that is what if we apply the same principles that we do to our external customers, to our teams?  And that’s basically what, when I talked about thinking about in socio-technical systems and reducing cognitive load. So for example, if a design leader comes up and says, you know, I want it to feel effortless for our teams to work together, and for us to collaborate and for us to do these things yeah, that might not seem like it’s advocating for the customer out, but it’s advocating for the customers internally and that’s a common sphere. I’m just thinking about things that are resonating in other communities…  Jesse: Yeah.  John: …that could then, like, up the influence. So for example, if the design leader’s saying like, “Wow, it’s so curious, like the architects they use words like flow or lowering cognitive load or the ease of release, ease of experimentation” or things. And yeah, you could go in and say, well, that doesn’t sound very user centric, I don’t care about your velocity thing.  But maybe the common ground is, wow, I would like it to be really easy and effortless for our teams to work together, to collaborate. The engineering side is sick of shipping things that don’t work because they have to maintain it. Ironically, the people who feel the pain, the worst are the engineering teams that have to to maintain the feature soup shipped over five years, none of it’s working and they have to maintain that stuff. So that would be number one kind of, that’s where the connection is. They hate maintaining all this stuff. So, that might be the engineering side. Like how can we make it easier to do those things?  I think that another area, sort of another vector of influence is: just humans and the pain that they’re experiencing. Think about, wow, you know, there’s a UX researcher and I don’t think she was even a trained service designer, she was wearing multiple hats, but came in with this great analysis of like what an outage feels like. What does it feel like for everyone involved, employees, customers, engineers, support? And I mean, CEO down to frontline person’s mind was blown. Like, this is a real example, human pain, right? All the humans involved. So I think that’s always a great place. So I do think that there is some alignment there, especially even in the product folks where they look to design to really understand that and expose those insights and think about that. Like, where are people struggling and where is it really having an impact on humans? And I think that that always counts. And then I think that the third element is you can go a long way by just deeply understanding the business situation that you’re in. And so I often ask people like, have you listened to the last earnings call? Do you understand the situation that the company is in at the moment? And I think that that’s where it’s always that balance between the healthy tension model, you know, you pay attention to users or that happy customer thing I just said, and we’ll take care of the business. And, I’m beginning to think that what that model does is… Healthy tension works when conditions are generally healthy, but when the shit’s hitting the fan, healthy tension becomes highly unhealthy tension, right? So I think that there’s that element of just deeply understanding the situation that the company is in and thinking strategically about, like, where will great design be a huge force multiplier for the company and for folks here and thinking on that strategic level. So I noticed a lot of design leaders say, well, I’ve been brought in, so I need an experience vision or I need an experience strategy. And I keep waiting for them to say like, no, given this landscape and given that we’re in just from a business level, like these are the three levers where design as a discipline is going to create huge force multipliers for this business. Jesse: RIght.  John: And a great example is, let’s say you’re selling into an enterprise environment and it’s highly complex multi-sided ecosystem of partners and other folks, and no PM is gonna really understand all of that and keep that in their head. You know, you want to go into that meeting and say, We’re going to win as a company if we can understand the complex relationships between these three or four different parties and enterprise companies, including their partners and their customers outside the building.  The only toolkit to really understand that is the design toolkit. Like, we have a way, our capabilities, our design capabilities are purpose built. And that can be a huge differentiator for the company. It can lower our customer acquisition costs, our customer retention costs, all that kind of blah, blah, blah, business stuff. I’m, of course, I’m a PM and I’m saying that, so maybe design folks are like, ah, I’ve heard that whole shtick about the business impact. But I’m not talking about business impact of UX. I’m saying, what is your strategy for the design toolkit and how it’s going to create force multipliers for the business? And you know, people talk about, what is this product-led or product model or whatever. I’m sick of all that, to be honest. I think we have a toolkit. The toolkit is design, data, and technology, and each of those is like its own toolkit, right? Like people in technology understand the technology toolkit. They understand what we’re going to be able to do with these ones and zeros and how we’re going to do it. Design is also a toolkit. You know, it’s like a toolkit of methods and techniques and all kinds of great things you can do. And the reason why I put data as the second one is that’s like information, right? Like ultimately, a lot of times we’re moving information. The data we have is really important and data is neither purely technical or purely design. It’s its own thing.  And so I tend to think that, like, what we’re doing is using this toolkit to create great outcomes for customers and create good outcomes for our business and our communities and things that we’re doing it. And labeling that all “product” seems disingenuous. That’s silly. We sell products.  You know, like, I don’t think it matters what we call these things internally. Just say, there’s a design toolkit, a technology toolkit, and a data toolkit. And how are we going to work through those together to create great things for the customers? And that usually gets them excited as they’re doing it. When it feels like things are beyond your control Peter: The sense I get from reading what you write, John, and the conversation we’ve had, is you tend to operate, and correct me if I’m wrong, at a waterline that’s like director down, right? It’s about development. It’s about making stuff. And how can we get the people who are trying to make stuff to do a better job working together to make that stuff? The 30 to 50 people kind of solution, right, would be kind of director level down.  But when I think about the forces that have led to some of the challenges that we’re facing, right, like the corruption of agile, or the engineers hating having to maintain products that don’t make sense, oftentimes those things that they were required to build did not emerge from the group who was responsible for product development, but was put upon them by executive leadership. And I’m wondering what you’re seeing in terms of, how do you engage this leadership suite? These executives who aren’t always good actors, right? There’s a lot going on at that level. There’s a lot of things they’re responding to in terms of the market or whatever. But where many of the problems that I see my clients addressing, is because of stuff that’s been pushed down on them from an even higher source that they can’t ignore. John: I mean this is a tough one because, I mean, even VP, I mean, everyone’s feeling this fog and swirl and stuff right now. It just depends their perspective on it and a lot of it feels self-inflicted, but a lot of it is sort of macro factors. I don’t know, I do talk to a lot of people and like, if the leaders just understood design or if we could just do this and do that, it would all be okay. Like, in the United States, too, it’s like any problem, we just need to lead harder. If we just led harder, it would be better, I think people need to also think about their own sanity and their own sustainability in the business and realize that we’re in a fairly incoherent time at the moment. There is that quote from the Shane Parrish book, Clear Thinking, is, like, no unforced errors. And I’ve extended that to think about, just don’t do things that have a low probability of working. And so what I think about that right now is there’s so much swirl and so much dissonance that like, take care of yourself. And for example, like, you could probably project yourself three to six months ahead and say, does this presentation really, really have a shot in hell of making any difference in the sort of current zeitgeist? And the answer would be no, like five to 10 percent probability that’s going to work. That’s the thing that you can just save yourself the heartache at the moment, like, just conserve energy.  And so this is probably not what you want to hear, but I think what everyone can do at the moment now is just work within their sphere of control or locus of control. Conserve energy. Don’t gaslight yourself. Maybe try not to gaslight other people, and see how these things are going to pan out. But there’s also an incredible opportunity now at the moment, this dissonance presents this opportunity, right? Because there’s new things. I mean, AI is a really good example of this where it’s just freaking everyone out. And there’s a lot of dissonance in the companies and people are throwing around money or not. And like, that might be an opportunity to think about a journey, for example, that could benefit from focus. And yes, just sprinkle a little AI on it, whatever you need to do, but this can be like a big opportunity. So I think that we have to like, we have to surf the wave of incoherence and sustain your sanity and don’t make unforced errors.  Do the all pre mortem: It’s three years from now. And legitimately, is the idea that you went to the C-suite and told them yet again about what human-centered design is, that presentation that they’ve done. What’s the probability that’s going to make any difference compared to, oh, guess what? There was an AI hackathon and we like basically hacked it to bring in a lot of ideas about what customers are trying to do in here. And we won the hackathon with a group and we’re shipping that next week. Like probably the hackathon thing is a lot more coherent in the grand scheme of things.  So I don’t know, take care of yourself. Like we need you around. The idea that there’s 48 year old design leaders who have like stellar background and think they’ve just had their last job in tech is one of the saddest things in the world to me.  And I’ve seen that in multiple folks now at the moment, they’ve been simultaneously like aged out, which is ageism, but the market is not looking for them at the moment, the other companies are like, no, we’re, we’re back down to business. We’re trying to get the work done. We’re moving and grooving. We’re in the details. We don’t want that C-suite shaper at the moment. Like we need the person who’s going to get it done.  And so I think you almost have to like ride the moment. Like that’s the zeitgeist at the moment. And, stay sane to work, continue working. ‘Cause we need all these people with these vast amount of experience over these decades. I think that that’s very important. Jesse: I’m curious in the face of all of this uncertainty and challenge what is there to hope for, do you think, for design and product leaders together and what they can create on the other side of this moment in the zeitgeist and this place of uncertainty? John: Well, maybe it’s the North American in me talking, but I’m like, well, who knows? I mean, this, followed by working out of an impending recession, might be an opportunity to do things differently. This is a great point. So if you’re looking at right now and saying, Oh God, the business world is going to stay like this forever, just sort of very ruthless, not really systems thinking, you know, it’s like very simplistic. There’s a lot of justing going on. There’s a lot of like narrative soup at the moment. If you imagine that it will stay that way forever, this is a very depressing time.  But I think that there are possibilities here that this is like every bubble, like every phase shift, there’s a sort of this liminal period, which is really uncomfortable. And I think that we could project also some good outcomes to come to this. Like, I’m kind of excited by the idea of these 30 to 50 person pods, if that would happen, because I think that that maybe is the next level of doing this. I was listening to a podcast recently from an engineering architect and they said, wow, I think we’ve learned some major, major lessons. What would it be like if we could get our teams collaborating a bit better to come outta this? I think that we’re in for a couple years of pain, but I mean, maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think someone like, Cameron Tonkinwise would say, we’re gonna design our future here, like design futures. There’s all that complex stuff that I… I should have been a designer. Seriously, you guys have so much fun. You could be in all these different levels all at once. I think that there’s a future here that could be very exciting and interesting to work in. And so I’m just holding out hope for that. And I’m just saying that don’t assume right now that everyone is a malicious actor. There’s just, again, I was talking about that VP who just imagines the world being very foggy.  I’ll leave people with this thought. Think about how many times in your life, you had to choose between staying in the wicked problem or just seeking the simple solution. I remember packing up my car from New York City, done a lot of not so good things in that. And I’m like, that’s it. I’m out. Clean slate it. That’s kind of equivalent in many of these environments to the layoffs, right? It’s like, Oh my God, things have got so incoherent. We don’t know what’s happening. We’re not profitable. The economy’s changing. Ah, ah.  It’s not a wholly irrational thing to think, I don’t know, maybe if we just start with fewer people, something will work out. Have you ever been a designer and gone so deep into some design and been like, I’ve thought about all this wrong, let’s clean slate this thing and move it out. So I would just say that the idea that it’s all malicious acting at the moment, again, maybe I’m just showing my sort of optimistic side, but I’m an optimistic pessimist. It’s really shitty right now, but I’m sort of optimistic that maybe it’s just murky for everyone. We’re just doing what we got to do and it’s going to work its way out. Jesse: John, thank you so much. John: Yeah. My, my pleasure. This is great. Yeah. this is a great podcast. This is awesome.  Jesse: Thank you.  Peter: Yeah. What’s the best place for folks to follow up with you? John: Oh, okay. So right now, after the many years of 50,000 tweets on Twitter and over 2,200 images that I created for Twitter, I have them all in a file. Decamped from Twitter. Once it, once the logo changed, I could emotionally disconnect. It was fascinating. There must be a design lesson in that.  Jesse: The power of design. Yeah.  John: My dopamine was so set on the bird that once it became that other thing, I didn’t look at the tab again. I’m just not, not on Twitter. And so LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is driving me crazy, but LinkedIn for now, or the newsletter is a good spot. You could, it probably, I think it has my email in it because somehow people figure out my email from the newsletter and then write me messages. So that’s the best spot. Jesse: John, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. John: Yeah. My pleasure. Yeah. I admire both of your all’s work too. So this is a real honor to do this. Peter: was fun.  Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,  Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way,  Peter: Navigating the opportunities  Jesse: and challenges  Peter: of design and design leadership,  Jesse: On today’s show, Anne Pascual, VP and Head of Design for European fashion e-commerce giant Zalando, joins us to talk about driving innovation in a mature product category, the differences between leading design for an agency and leading design in-house, and creating a culture of trust at scale. Peter: Thank you so much for joining us. Just to start off, it would be great to hear what you’re up to. I know you’ve been at Zalando for a while, but tell us a little bit about your journey and how you’ve arrived at where you are. Anne: Yes, I’m happy to do so. Great to be here. So yeah, I’ve been with Zalando now over seven years. My current role is SVP Product Design, Marketing and Content. I actually started working with Zalando already nine years ago. At the time I was an executive design director at IDEO. And had the pleasure to consult Zalando, building up an innovation team, and then work basically side by side with Zalando for two years until I made the decision, okay, I want to now join and build a team from the ground up. So I started off building up the product design team, which at the time, there were only two handful of UX designers, quite low design maturity in general, but a thriving startup with incredible growth rates. And so the first couple of years, I really focused just on product design and matured the team to a decent size and build different leadership layers, processes. Then I expanded my role to also look after brand marketing and content creation, which is super exciting. As those are adjacent fields, but also very different fields and job families. So I’ve been learning a lot about that, but really the reason for this role is that obviously in order to build the brand and a coherent, compelling customer experience, those parts are super important when you work for the largest fashion e- commerce player in Europe. These journeys are quite intertwined. How you discover the brand, how you look at an ad, how you think more in general about fashion, and then come to the app to explore the assortment through content, through imagery, that then gets produced either in-house or sourced from brands, creators, or third party vendors. So yeah, my job is definitely super interesting and I keep learning every day. Designing for fashion experiences Jesse: Fashion is a really interesting category for design because design has, I think, a special impact in that category on brand perception and perception of value and luxury and things like that. And I’m curious about how that’s come into play as you’ve been building up a design function for a giant fashion ecommerce retailer.  Anne: Yeah. I mean, luckily I’m also personally very passionate about fashion. I think it’s a super interesting way to express identity, to communicate, to innovate. So I’ve been always kind of interested in fashion as an individual. And when I got to work with Zalando, it became clear that fashion is this really important vehicle for people to express themselves connect with others. And it’s also a super interesting industry. Where you see on one hand, large established fashion brands that in the beginning didn’t have any real connection to digital channels. And that’s where Zalando came in to really become the first big player in Europe to help those brands get their assortment online and make this access to fashion very easy and convenient. This is also what Zalando became known for in the first couple of years. And design at the beginning obviously played a role in making that experience very seamless and trustworthy because, you know, people still had to get their head around how do I buy a pair of shoes or dress online? And, I’m comfortable returning it if it doesn’t fit. So initially design is really about making the functional aspects of e-com work and doing a decent job in representing fashion through the right image representation, the right product detail information, but obviously also the whole transactional flow of adding something to the checkout and cart. Now, what’s been super interesting is that from moving beyond just designing for these functional aspects I believe that also our team became more and more important to provide strategic guidance on where the overall experience should evolve to. And especially over the last couple of months and years, we’ve seen how fashion desires a much more emotional experience than maybe we have been providing until now. So yes, the transactional part runs super smooth and very successfully. But if you look around, fashion is very much related to inspiration, and these days there’s a lot of it happening on social media. So now the design team, not only the design team, is focusing a lot around how do you get across these elements around storytelling and entertainment. How do you make the experience around fashion a lot more emotional? And less transactional and functional.  So yes, you’re absolutely right. This is exactly kind of the interesting design opportunity here to, on one hand, fulfill those functional needs around the shopping experience and the product as the garment and piece of clothing. And on the other hand, to be able to convey the stories behind the products, the stories behind the brands, and also really connect with our customers on an emotional level. And that’s not always easy, but super, super interesting. Innovating in e-commerce Jesse: I think that for a lot of people who work outside e-commerce, but we are all, of course, e-commerce users, e-commerce as a category feels very mature, right? We’ve had now 30 years of e-commerce best practices to draw on. And it’s interesting. because it sounds like what’s happened for you and your team is the realization of the need to go beyond those best practices to reintroduce design innovation into a category that doesn’t really feel like it has a lot of room for innovation, and I’m curious about how that’s come about and how you’ve gone about it as a design team.  Anne: Yeah. I mean, you’re absolutely right. We’ve done extensive work to actually map all the jobs to be done along this purchase journey. And they’re quite clear around, you know, finding an item, making a decision, understanding what you’re getting, how it may actually fit compared to other items and your style and then receiving it, potentially returning it or, keeping it. So you’re right. There’s not like that many new problems to discover. At the same time, there’s still some fundamental problems to be solved. One, for instance, being size and fit. So it’s still one of the biggest challenges in comparison to the physical world, to know if something will fit me. And we have a dedicated team that’s been working for over many years now to identify different ways to provide size advice and recommendation. But also help customers build a size profile on Zalando and, through their usage, get better recommendations.  Now on the innovation side, what’s interesting is obviously that this industry is under fundamental changes, or going through fundamental changes, and there’s a few of them that now have really informed also our most recent strategy update. One is this generational shift that many of our future, near-term customers have been growing up now with the Internet and smartphones and for them shopping in itself is of very different nature than maybe for our generation. We’ve been kind of happy to browse a category tree and I would say more of a warehouse-like UX, but this new generation has very different expectations and is used to different ways to discover what they like. The second big shift, and potential for innovation, it’s obviously also technology– Gen AI now introduces totally new ways to interact with customers. Being at conversational UIs, but also how you generate content, and that obviously is super, super exciting to see.  Then there is obviously also the environmental shift that we are all very aware of, and that requires the whole industry to adapt. Thinking about how to provide the right information about a garment, how to give customers better choices to understand the environmental footprint. And this is something that obviously not a single player, even a large one like ourselves, can design in isolation, but it’s about working closely with authorities, other fashion brands, to really establish new standards and new ways to do justice to these big challenges for the industry as such. So, there is a lot to innovate around and that one particular part that I’m focusing on in my current role is around inspiration and entertainment. So how do you create a completely new experience for customers to discover fashion and lifestyle, and to spend quality time on Zalando to learn more about fashion, fashion brands and products, but also to enjoy different ways to participate and play a more active role in this experience.  So right now, as I said, shopping is very one directional and very transactional, but if you think about it, it’s by nature, a lot more social and a lot more entertaining than purely adding something to your cart. So we want to really crack content in commerce. And yes, several social media platforms have tried to enter commerce, have failed. In other parts of the world, they’re extremely successful doing it. And we believe that we’re very well positioned to now conquer this next era and to make that seamless transition from discovery to purchase much, much easier than anywhere else. Peter: This move, to go beyond transactions and towards experience, feels natural for a design organization, but often design organizations aren’t given that permission or freedom to explore. There’s too much needing to prove themselves that often happens. And I’m wondering you know, you’ve been there for a while now. So what have you done to bolster your team’s credibility in these ways, so that they’re given opportunities to try things that might be, I don’t know if risky is right, but say experimental? And how are you working with the other parts of the business, right? I’m assuming design isn’t, you know, doing these experiential experiments on their own. So what is that like in terms of your connection with others to realize these opportunities? Anne: Yeah. By any means, the design team is not the only team to work on these ideas. And indeed it’s, much more of a cross-functional growth vector for many parts of the business that believe that there’s a new era and a new frontier to conquer for us. The first 15 years of Zalando were very much focused on growth, and we know those sets of customer problems to solve for, and to be able to scale and to optimize for speed. And there, one of the biggest strengths of Zalando is probably the analytical part of being very data-centric. But also being really good at, you know, the commercial parts of the business, the strong brand relationships and, by now, being the largest fulfillment network for fashion across Europe. So these are kind of the, I would say, business and operational backbone and infrastructure that has been built. When it comes to the design team, I think we were very much focused on adding a layer of customer experience that would be very robust and very solid, so to say, and very scalable. And I think that, you know, helped scale the business specifically throughout the years of the pandemic. That were obviously we were very fortunate to go through as a business. Establshing an innovation practice Anne: And then always keeping an eye on what’s next. So this team that I initially led when I started working with Zalando, this innovation team always remained, not at the same size, but it’s been always part of the design team. To pick up topics that organizationally would not have yet a permanent team staffed or a clear mandate and mission defined so that we could pick up some of these signals and explore them further. And that gave the design team permission to not be fixed or constrained by structural boundaries and keep exploring. But to be fair, I think this focus on experiences is something that was rather led by the vision of our co-founders who have shaped now the strategy for many years, and were also very convinced about this path. And they now lean on senior leaders like myself and many others to really articulate: how do we realize this vision and what are the different capabilities that we need to have on the team? And one of them is product design and specifically also this element around storytelling and content. And so I think it’s really a combination of having built a solid foundation, a mature team, and process working very closely with product management and engineering on eye level, being very much aware of the core business and also the affordances of running that day to day, but making room for innovation and investments in further growth areas. So yeah, it’s probably been, you know, a couple of attempts to also really define what these new areas are. But I’m very happy to say that we have found a really good way to now structurally and systemically work through some of these opportunities. Peter: And am I right in understanding that part of your design team is a like small innovation function?  Anne: Yes  Peter: Interesting. I would love to hear more about what the makeup of that is, because a lot of design orgs try to either have a strategy or innovation team, and it often doesn’t work because they’re not connected with the day to day. And so they do these explorations and it’s green field and blue sky and very exciting. But then when you try to productize it, it doesn’t go anywhere. And so I’m wondering how you’ve been able to set this team up where it sounds like it’s actually gotten traction, and the sense making and explorations they’re doing do get brought into the broader fold. Anne: The first advice is don’t call it the innovation team. You don’t do that team a favor because no matter what size a company is, I don’t think you will find someone who says, I don’t do innovation, right? So don’t make it like this exclusive elitist little team that gets to work just on the fun idea so to say.  And again, going back to how I started working with Zalando nine years ago, it was a team that was quite distanced from the core and was the satellite team that had minimal connection to core business. And that had some advantages. Blue sky. You don’t feel the pressure of the day to day. You really think you know, white piece of paper and you kind of have this freedom, right?  What I personally really started lacking though is exactly that thrive for impact because many, many of the ideas that the team came up with, they were not wrong, but it was really, really hard to implement them and to scale them. If you wouldn’t have access and integration to the rest of the team, which was also ultimately why I wanted to join because it was also quite frustrating after a while to feel like you had the right ideas, but no means to act upon them. Now the studio team, as we call it, it’s nature probably shifted every year. Every year we’ll be sitting down and thinking, okay, what’s the most important thing we need to solve as Zalando? How can we help? What are the specific skills we have? What are specific topics we can do? What are specific projects we can do to really advance on the most important topics? And we never, from then on did that in isolation, but we partnered up with other parts of the business, in many and most cases with other product teams to really a learn about what are the biggest feasibility challenges to consider, but what are also the critical business inputs and requirements to understand better. And then most importantly, how do we identify the future owners of these ideas that would basically be part of the process. And then really take on some of those ideas to implement them. That worked in many, some instances. In many instances, it didn’t. But the team, again, it’s a small team of now, I would say, five to eight people. And the makeup would be design strategist with very strong actual hard skills. So the deliverables were things that could be implemented by an engineer. And even now the team is driving large part of the roadmap definition and the solution designs we’re working on. Why? Because there’s really no other way to make very complex ideas work across many different teams if you’re not literally embedded and feeling part of the rest of the team. So it’s sort of a ring fence team but really it works side by side with all the other product designers.  Jesse: I noticed in the way that you talk about it that design seems to have a pretty significant influence on, really, product strategy. And I’m curious about a couple of things. I’m curious, first of all, who is your boss? And secondly, what is your relationship to a product management or product oversight function?  Anne: Yeah. My current boss is the co-CEO and co founder Robert Gentz. And my most important peer is the SVP product management Andrew Watts who joined Zalando four years ago. And that was actually amazing, because with such a strong counterpart who also understands and appreciates the value of design, you can make a lot of things happen together. And so I have to really mention and give credit also to the VP product design who now runs the product design team on a day to day basis, also former IDEO-er, so that I can also add a focus on additional topics like marketing and content creation. So just want to make that super clear that without Tim I couldn’t do my job. And again, I think it’s this ability to get your hands dirty, get things done, work on prototypes in a short amount of time. But then also be able to sponsor very large, very complex implementation projects over a couple of months where even Tim, the VP product design, is the main sponsor although it could be a very technical project. So. I think it’s about this deep understanding of both the business and the technology that allows design to play this influence. And preparing for this podcast, I was reflecting on the journey, you know, over the last 20 years to be in design. I think that’s been the most rewarding part. To feel like because I’m now so deeply embedded in the business and in the leadership, it’s so much more exciting to see what design can do versus maybe being part of a design only team, or maybe a much more design-focused organization where you’re just one of many. But in my case, I know it’s one perspective that is very unique and very different that the team brings. It’s highly embedded and integrated and can hopefully make a big difference in many, many different ways. Design consulting vs design in-house Peter: You mentioned your head of product design is also from IDEO. Your background is IDEO. I know you’ve been at Zalando for a while now, but you also spent a long time at IDEO. Jesse and I spent a long time at Adaptive Path, so we understand the design consulting space. I’m curious, what your experience was, shifting from operating within a design agency, design consultancy, and then coming in house. And I suspect you have motivations similar to me, which is to try to bring a lot of the good things about design agencies and how they work and the quality they drive. But you also recognize you can’t just put an agency inside of a company and call it a day, right? There’s a different way of working. So what has that transition been like for you? What have you done to maintain whatever ideals you might have had in an environment like IDEO, but within an enterprise like Zalando? Anne: Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of things that I still apply day to day that I learned throughout my time at IDEO. One is how to deal with ambiguity. The fact that you are being tasked to solve something you don’t really understand fully, but you’re able to grasp and work through and decompose is something super, super important. Even when you work over a couple of years in an established environment, and also your role becomes more and more familiar. I think this ability to also seek ambiguity and understand where there is an opportunity is something super, super valuable that I still, use from back in the days.  The second aspect that I also still keep using and that, you know, comes from having worked in that environment is tangibility. The need to come up very quickly with very concrete ideas because you have limited time to get across, you know, what you want to get across in terms of design opportunities and being able to make that tangible and through that. great conviction and believe on the other side that this is where we could go. This is where we could take the product or the service.  That’s something extremely powerful and much more effective than doing just a PowerPoint or having yet another meeting or a discussion.  So, and then the third aspect that I also still appreciate thinking back about that time is resilience overall, around changes in scope, changes in timeline, changes in deliverable, changes in team members, changes in stakeholders. Like you never know what to expect when you work on a project or program on the consulting side. And that really sharpens your tools, but also your communication skills and also your ability to collaborate. So those were the things that I really appreciated and took with me.  Now shifting into the more corporate world, the few things I had to learn there was, in general, how to deal with complexity, because, you know, working in a small project team, you know your four other peers and you work with them day to day. And that’s it. In order to get something done in a large company, you have to understand how you navigate complexity organizationally, technically, business-wise. And there’s a lot more inputs you have to take into consideration. The second part that I really love and that is obviously not always the easiest: leadership. The amount of decisions you need to make, the amount of change you need to manage, the amount of translation around what the strategy is, what the roadmap is, that requires a lot of leadership that I don’t think I ever had to apply when I was on the consulting side. And the third thing I really had to build muscles around is in general execution. So being quick in decision making, being clear around certain priorities thinking through what could go wrong. thinking through who needed to be involved, what needed to be true, what could help the other side. So execution is just something that yeah, requires very different muscles than if you only work on the strategy side.  Jesse: I wanted to ask a similar question and maybe you don’t actually have any additional answers here. But I’m also curious about because you spent such a long time as a consultant. You were at IDEO for more than a decade. What ideas about the practice you might’ve had to unlearn or leave behind as you were transitioning out of consulting into the in house environment?  Anne: I mean, I would say that what’s true in particular for IDEO and what IDEO became famous for was a lot of the qualitative insights that, don’t get me wrong, are still super, super important. But I think now looking at how important data is and how important KPIs are, I think it’s less about unlearning, but just learning full steam and continuously around that part. Unlearning, maybe it’s also this endless amount of opportunity where, when you work in an organization and in a business, resources are not endless, and there’s business objectives. So at some point it’s about, you know, really assessing what is the most important thing to focus on. Even though I remain super curious and I remain to see lots of different new things, it’s also important to provide stability, continuity, and focus to the teams.  The other thing I think I had to unlearn is that as a consultant, you’re very much trained to listen to the stakeholder and to kind of help align the different perspectives, but being in a leadership role myself, it’s even more important for me to have a perspective and for me to be able to, you know, debate and disagree. And that’s not always what we’re used to, because we start with this empathy for every different perspectives in the room. And we try to, you know, really listen to everyone as a consultant. So that’s also something that I think I have to unlearn a bit. Peter: As you were reflecting, I found myself thinking about how this podcast is about design leadership and navigating the space of design leadership. And I’m curious what you found to be the difference in design leadership as a concept within IDEO where it sounds like you were like an executive creative director, at least quite senior, and now as a VP and then SVP of design in house. Does design leadership mean different things in these different environments or have you found it to be the same thing? Anne: Yeah, 100%. I would say at IDEO, being a design leader meant, in this particular role of a design director, to raise the bar, right? To raise the bar on the thinking, on the ideas, on the quality of the work, and to push the team to think bigger.  Now internally design leadership is more about accountability. What is my contribution? What is my team’s contribution to the overall business? And are we doing the best we can to accelerate, to improve, to optimize what we are doing? So that is a very different way I would define the aspects of design leadership in both instances. Scaling everything (including yourself) Jesse: One of the challenges that you touched on, as you were talking about making the transition from the consulting role to the in house role, was just simply the challenge of scale, bigger team, bigger problems, you know, bigger stakeholder community, just everything operating at a larger scale, everything operating at, as you pointed out, much too large a scale for you personally to engage across everything. And I’m curious your thoughts on strategically scaling your team and especially strategically scaling yourself as a leader and how you’ve gone about that.  Anne: Yeah, that is a really good one. I would start with maybe something surprising which is culture. I think from the beginning, because I was used to such a strong culture coming from IDEO, it was very important to build a team that felt more like a community and not in the soft type of way, but more in terms of the level of trust and safety, psychological safety, and also the level of collaboration and support the team would give each other, because that allowed everyone to raise the bar, to move faster and to really go for the best outcomes.  On top of that, it was also about setting the right standards who to hire. So how do you run hiring interviews? How do you assess the seniority of a designer? And then how do you also keep up with type of talent that you are looking for, which was something super, super important. Then obviously as a third thing, processes, to kind of have the right rituals in place, design reviews weekly check ins, all of that. And then fourth, luckily, I think we saw a lot of great things happening on the effectiveness of designs teams and the scalability of them through the introduction of design systems, or even design operations, and then also just the rise of new design tools that would make it a lot easier to collaborate as a design team, with tools like Figma, Miro. And then, yeah, being lucky to have a really great leadership team that is able to really drive things forward, that share your vision. That are equally equipped with stakeholder management skills and great craft. And that can, you know, run on their own and identify with a bigger vision. Jesse: One of the issues with building up a trustworthy team in this way is getting the business to trust that team especially as, you know, you have a mandate that extends beyond things that are readily measured. You have some somewhat more qualitative things that you and your team are on the hook for. You can develop a certain amount of personal trust with your counterparts at the level in the organization that you are. But again, you can’t be everywhere and you can’t be in all the meetings and you can’t be engaged with every stakeholder. So I’m curious about how do you support your team in helping them develop trusting relationships that enable them to deliver on these things for their stakeholders.  Anne: Yeah. I mean, I also want to make sure it doesn’t sound like everything is easy and always going smoothly, but again, we’ve been lucky to, as I said, build up maturity of the design team and also the product and tech organization over many years. And we have had very strong tech leaders who have had many years of experience, for instance, at Amazon and brought a lot of great things to the team that allowed everyone to work better together and understand, okay, what are we trying to do here?  So we, for instance, write PR FAQs. We go through the solution design phase, and then the execution phase. And so we’ve been spending a lot of time a couple years ago to really define what is each other’s roles at what step of the process and who is at which time leading or following. And it’s been very clear that, for instance, in this very initial phase, this PR FAQ phase, product is leading and design is supporting. Design is supporting by helping with ideas and research and insights and sketches, maybe some initial visuals but really giving, you know, the front seat to product.  On the second stage, solution design, it’s where design picks up the baton and takes the lead and really going really, really deep on the user journeys and the different features and, you know, how things would come together. And then the third stage where engineering is leading and driving the execution. We also introduced some really great project management that would establish great drum beats, great documentation. We invested quite a lot in written documentation which, you know, helped everyone to have the same understanding of certain problems we were trying to solve, created a lot of transparency that maybe otherwise gets a bit lost when you only do it in workshops. Maybe during the pandemic, we did that a little bit too much and we had to rebuild trust more from a, you know, personal interaction perspective over the last two years. But even the fact that when you come to the floor and the building where the design team sits, like they are embedded then across different parts of the buildings to really work side by side with the other product teams. Yes, they have a home base, but it’s this commitment to the respective areas that they work with day to day that there’s no idea of like, oh, this is, you know, this other team. But it’s really about touching different parts of the experience together with product and engineering. Peter: I’ve been doing some work with European clients, one in particular where it’s totally remote. And one of the challenges that we’re talking about is how do we collaborate better remotely, asynchronously? And I’m wondering how you guys are working, collaborating. Are you remote? Are you hybrid? Are you part time hybrid? What have you found or where have you guys landed in terms of what’s working well to support the kind of collaboration that you want to do? Anne: Yeah, we have a hybrid model in place. And that means split of 40, 60 if I’m not mistaken. So 40 percent onsite and 60% remote, with lots of flexibility built in when exactly you are on site which is defined by what we call team charters so that the different leaders can decide, Hey, what’s the mode that works for us? It could be, you know, we all come for specific dates, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is a very almost common one. The other ones say, let’s come together during that week and spend the whole time together. So it’s flexible and it works I think for the design team and again, you know, there’s obviously lots and lots of work happening that I’m not directly involved in, but we have, for instance, what we call the weekly design review, and that is encouraged to take place in person. Why, because it’s a lot easier to look at designs and look for, you know, cues and like body language around like, Hey how would that work? We also try to print out more of the work again, because it’s so much easier when you have things up on the wall and can point at things. So, you know, the old school way kind of and then obviously we still have people sometimes on the screen that dial in from other tech hubs and where we can seamlessly have them look at the Figma file and equally leave comments to ensure there’s an inclusive way to moderate and host the session. And then, I think in general, outside of these important rituals, it’s really about having a feeling for how the community is doing, how much energy there is, and being able to bump into each other and grab lunch together. I mean, all these important things that we missed so dearly during the pandemic, but that make every team work much, much better together. Peter: Kind of related. So you mentioned teams are the ones deciding when they come together. And I’m making an assumption here that those are product teams, cross functional teams. But then you mentioned the design review and something that I see particularly scaled design organizations have challenges with, particularly the designers within those organizations, is the degree to which they are beholden to their cross functional product team, their squad or pillar or whatever it ends up being called in their organization, and their functional design team, and what that design team is trying to get done. And those things are not always aligned, right? There’s different modes of working, might be different OKRs.  How are you helping the people in your org navigate what can sometimes feel like being beholden to two masters, their product team masters and their design team masters? Anne: Yeah, I have to admit, I haven’t heard that many issues around that. Maybe… yeah, because I’m not aware and they still exist. That could be, but also because this model has been in place almost from the start. And it hasn’t been questioned and designers report into design and we have design leadership levels from what we call team leads, heads, directors, and VPs up to my role, really having a level of cohesion around the performance, the communication, the processes, but have equally this eye-level peer on the other side. And I think that helps a lot around escalations or dealing with friction or agreeing on Hey, maybe we should, you know, rethink this.   Peter: When you say the other side, is that primarily product? Is it like, so,a design VP has a product VP, and a design director has product director and it’s one to one? Coming together as a product design team Anne: Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And obviously, they have rituals as well, but then we have these moments where we come together as a, product design team. One thing actually that is super, super nice, I haven’t been in a long time, but if I go, I’m so inspired. It’s what we call the Campfire where we bring actually all product design from the entire company together. So if I refer to the product design team until now, it’s basically everyone who works on the B2C side on the fashion app, but then we also have designers in B2B, we have an off price business and so there’s another, 50 people, 60 people joining on top of the big design team we have in B2C to really bring all their work together once a month. So you get within an hour, a snapshot of what everybody is working on. And that’s super, super nice because you really appreciate the diversity of the work, the diversity of the designers but also through that, you achieve a lot of helpful rotation of ideas and people. So I think one reason why we’ve become such an attractive employer for design is that you have people to learn from and you have options and opportunities to grow into different roles and to work on different topics along the way. So that’s been super, super nice and very effective to keep the work at a high level.  Jesse: It seems to me that so many of these scaling challenges come back to having a leadership team underneath you that you can invest a lot of trust in so that you can turn your back on so many of these different aspects of it and focus on these higher level strategic priorities. And I’m curious about what you do to stay aligned with the folks who are directly underneath you, who are overseeing all of these aspects of design on behalf of the business.  Anne: Yeah, I mean, maybe one thing to call out is that while I’m able to delegate a lot, and there’s a lot more work that other leaders are driving, there’s definitely a couple of topics where I’m deeply, deeply involved myself and where I do a lot of the actual thinking and the actual, you know, alignment myself. So I think that is actually super important to stay grounded. And so up to the executive level, we’re all sponsors of projects and goals that require a lot of leadership attention day to day and being into the details. We have this leadership principle called fly high, dive deep. So being able to still keep in touch with the design details and the design decisions is super, super important. And by now I may, you know, include what does that mean for marketing? What does it mean for content or what does it mean in general for some of our business priorities and goals that I think is super, super important to stay aligned because I could see how, if I wouldn’t do that, I would just lose touch and I would just, you know, come up with unreasonable ideas and unreasonable requests. And I think this way, I think it’s much more natural to walk up to any design leader and, you know, work together on something as concrete as, you know, the next launch, or the next reduction of a customer defect that we discuss for instance, every week as part of a broader leadership group. So alignment can only happen, I think, through the actual work and on the strategic level where the team needs to be super, super clear and as aligned with the rest of the organization, including commercial teams, including other parts to say we all understand where we are going, and we all use the same language. And we all contribute to some of those milestones that we define, for instance, on a yearly basis. I think that is the important ingredient of alignment.  Taking initiative Jesse: You mentioned that part of staying aligned with the team for you is having some things that you personally own and some initiatives that you personally drive. Are you generating your own initiatives for yourself? Or is this more a matter of assessing what the business is asking for and picking the things that you think are the places where you particularly are able to dig in and if so, what are your criteria?  Anne: Yeah. I mean, I was just imagining how I would wake up one morning and say like, Oh, let’s start this initiative. I don’t think that would work. But back to, you know, picking up on the understanding of where the business is going, where the opportunity lies.  So for instance, also by meeting with brand partners, understanding what they’re trying to achieve. And then being able to also take a request from the management board that says, Hey, can you please help define, explore what this opportunity could be like or, you know, here’s a couple of important signals we’re getting on the main business KPIs. How can we tackle it, be it customer life cycle management or ad revenue. We have a retail marketing business to support. So those are the things that I pick up and that I work together with other leaders on, and then with staffing teams that are fully dedicated to making things happen.  I do have obviously things that I then personally drive that maybe initially didn’t have an owner, but that I feel like I should do. So for instance two years ago, we acquired a media company called Highsnobiety. They’re globally known for identifying fashion trends and they’re a publisher themselves. And we started working with them just because they have these storytelling capabilities that we believe we have been missing and that we should invest further on and going through this process was in itself, super interesting.  But then working with them side by side to identify what could be initiatives that help us to really develop those muscles. And that’s how end of last year we launched what we call Stories on Zalando. It’s the first content-first experience in our app, where we developed a content strategy and content franchises that we would scale very quickly within weeks to be able to publish stories three to five times per week. And that had to bring together lots of different teams across the business in content creation, and marketing, product design, but also obviously on the engineering side, to make happen. And obviously also on the assortment side, because we often talk about specific products and specific brands in those stories. So working with colleagues on the fashion proposition side, as we call it, was super, super essential. And I, devoted a lot of time to make that happen. And for me to be able to, together with other design leaders, to think about what are the subtle paradigm shifts we want to introduce, like a video, short video format. And being able to anticipate what would that do for this transactional journey to bring in these stories. That was something that I was personally and have been, and still are, super personally passionate about. And quite, quite involved. Peter: You’ve mentioned how you oversee not just product design, but brand and marketing design. And then you talk about content. I’m curious if anyone else besides maybe the CEO has the same breadth of purview that you do from true end-to-end customer experience. I found when I was running design at Groupon, because I also had the brand design team, I knew more about what was going on across the experience than… my boss was the SVP of product, because they were limited in scope to that product experience. So I’m wondering if you really are like unique within Zalando, apart from maybe the CEO, in terms of really seeing an end-to-end experience that no one other, even executive might be aware of, and what are the implications of that breadth of perspective? Anne: I don’t think it’s so unique to my role and mandate. If you think about other functional leaders like the SVP product management. Runs the entire e-com platform end to end. So, you know, knowing exactly how product data, customer data, checkout, all of that works is huge and important for all parts of the business. The commerce team as we call it is really, really big because it includes all the partner services. So we also have a partner program, marketplace business that allows us to broaden our assortment that is massive in terms of technology and operations. In that remit is also the retail marketing organization, which is another big, big business unit. So, I honestly don’t think necessarily that my role is that unusual, but I agree very broad when it comes to how to shape the customer perception. What makes the role still interesting, at times challenging, is that it’s not given that you have end to end control on all these different parts because obviously as a function, you receive a lot of the requirements from the different markets from the different parts of the commerce team.  And so it’s, I believe, very different from, for instance, an organization like Airbnb, where you find a lot more centralization, simplify some of the decision making right away. And then the other aspect that is important to keep in mind is that the experience we built is very dynamic in terms of the different business steerings that you have in place. So it’s a seasonal business where you have a lot of commercial activations happening. You also have the whole element of personalization, being able to cater to almost 50 million customers individually.  So even if it sounds like, you know, there’s a lot of control and end to end influence, yes, and at the same time, there’s only as much that each individual is immediately influencing right away. That said, what’s super, super important in what we call mission and mandates is that each leader at a given seniority is very clear in terms of what are the KPIs you’re accountable for and how do you, even if lots of things are not in your control, are the ambassador of this KPI. So that if something goes wrong, something develops differently, you can be the one who chases the root cause. So I think that’s also something that makes, I think, the whole work of working with other teams so important because ownership is super, super important to move the business forward. Peter: What, what, what are, what are your KPIs? KPIs for design Anne: Yeah. So one part of my team is actually a tech team that runs our home, our launch screen when you open the app. So understanding how many customers open the app and spend time on Zalando. Right now we focus more on the views of these customers, but then also how quickly do we engage them? That is super, super important.  Then it’s the amount of content creators that we have on the platform. So here you have the influencers, but it’s also, for instance, how many brand shops do we have where brands upload their own content. Some of those placements on home are sponsored placements. So understanding how much ad revenue is generated through those placements. And then on the product detail page, it’s obviously, you know, the amount of product imagery or time to online when you look at individual SKUs per product which is also an important KPIs. So those are a few when it comes to the app experience. And then on brand, it’s obviously brand awareness, consideration. Brand loyalty yeah, things like this. So it’s slow and fast moving KPIs that I’m accountable for. Peter: You mentioned influencers and something I’m finding myself wondering about your organization is how you think about your user types, to be as kind of generic as possible. Just, it sounds like shoppers, there’s influencers, there might be merchants, maybe there’s others that I’m, there might be internal people. Like what are the audiences that you are responsible for delivering these experiences to? And how do you navigate, kind of, that ecosystem of people and their various wants and how they come together in this platform. Anne: I mean, I would distinguish maybe two aspects. One is like, who do you have in mind when you design experiences? So more on the kind of behavioral user types. And then obviously you have on the actual marketing more the definition around who do you target and what are the customers cohorts that you want to develop further, which is mainly defined by commercial teams in the different markets. And then you’re right. There’s this dimension of like, who are the actual people using technology or interacting with it. And you already mentioned a couple. There’s on one hand the brand partners that can upload content. Then you have creators who we hire to submit and then there are internal teams, obviously. So it’s definitely already quite a broad landscape, but I could also see how over the next coming years, it could even further broaden. Meaning, you know, what if we would allow our customers to create, upload content which is not something we’re immediately working on, but that could become interesting maybe over a couple of years.  Jesse: What are you most curious about right now as a design leader?  Anne: I’m most curious about this idea about speed, speed and quality. So we talk about this internally because when you reach a certain size and you run a very large business, then obviously things get more complex, et cetera.  But if you go back to, you know, how can we accelerate our velocity and decision making, but then on the other hand, how do you also not jeopardize quality, quality in the experience or quality in the decision making? I think that’s a super interesting tension, and I’m super curious how I can get good at this, but also how, obviously, collectively we get good at this.  And even beyond being part of an individual organization or company, I think it’s something super interesting on a societal level where I think we all got used to things moving so quickly, that it’s sometimes already overwhelming and we overlook, you know, what is the important part where we should slow down or where we should revisit and hold onto.  So I think it’s one that is probably important, not just as a professional, but just in general, as a human being. Jesse: Anne thank you so much. This has been great.  Peter: Thank you. Anne: My pleasure.  Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet?  Anne: I guess on the new Facebook called LinkedIn. Yeah in Berlin and on LinkedIn and obviously through the Zalando app. So if you want to see what I’m up to, please download Zalando and become a customer in Europe. Peter: Excellent. I’ll do that when I’m in Europe.  Take care. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: On today’s show, Koji Pereira, Chief Design Officer for Brazilian fintech Neon, joins us to talk about his career journey from Brazil to Silicon Valley and back again, finding the balance between speed and quality, and strategies for making the design team and the design process more inclusive. Peter: Thank you so much for joining us, Koji. I think where we’d like to begin is just to get a better sense of your story. Who are you? What are you about? Where are you from? And what are you up to? Koji: Awesome. Well, first of all, thanks a lot for having me, Peter and Jesse. I’m very happy to be here. I’ve been following the podcast and you’re doing a great work. Thanks for that. Koji’s story Koji: I am originally from Brazil and I think my story began on design with graphic design. I was on graphic design for a pretty short period of time, starting doing posters for bands. I had my own band back in 1997 and then the internet was becoming a thing in Brazil and, you know, I was an early adopter. Before, I had a BBS, a bulletin board system where people could, you know, call my BBS and access pretty much like a website on DOS, which was crazy. So when the internet began, I was like, this is interesting, because to me, there’s a potential here for design to become something interactive and something with motion. And, you know, I started doing websites for companies and small businesses. And then around the year 2000, I joined another person who was building this website where people could order food from, and it was desktop internet back then, people would open a website, turn on their computers, that would take a lot of time anyways, then dial up to internet connection, open a website, and then, let’s say, 15 minutes later, they have a website where they can order pizza from. And I had a server connected to a facsimile. And we had a software that would send orders to the pizza place. Then the pizza place would deliver the pizza, they would get the money in cash. And that was our business model. Basically we were like a white list or yellow list for pizza. And we had this small service that run in the background. So that was my first experience with web design back then. And because of this company, we ended up selling this and I joined Google to work on Orkut. I don’t know if you all recall was the biggest Peter: I’ve met Orkut. Koji: You met Orkut? Okay, cool. So you’re very familiar, but for people who don’t know, Orkut was the biggest social network in Brazil and India. In U.S. I think was most of the time the second, losing for MySpace at some point and for, I think, was Friendster before. Jesse: Yeah. Koji: And of course, like Google was a totally different world for me back then. Working in tech Koji: The typical corporate job was very different from what it is today, and especially in Brazil, even more different. And for me coming from like a very, you know, half neighborhood in Brazil and going to this world, working at Google and even in Brazil was so, so different for me and kind of opened my eye to a lot of different stuff. So I think that’s pretty much how I began back in my career with product design, UX slash web design at that time. Peter: Tell us a little bit about kind of how you’ve evolved as a designer and design leader. Koji: Right. So I stay at Google for almost 10 years, and the reason why I stay 10 years is because with Google you have so many options, right? Like you can move from one team to another team, and there’s always these smaller teams trying to build something new. And those are the teams that I liked the most. You know, I was never really excited about the teams that were kind of, you know, keeping things going in a bigger scale. I was more interested on, like, teams are building something from scratch, zero to one products. And the last team that I joined was a team that I enjoyed the most, which was Next Billion Users. And to me, it was full circle because we’re trying to create products for emerging markets. Back then, we did a lot of research in India, Brazil, China, too, and Africa, and we build a product called Files. And what Files did was help people to free up space in their phones by looking at their storage. And for us here in the U.S. might not be an issue, but when you look at the population in the world, like 80 percent of people are using, at that time, Android. Most of the people are in phones that are under 300 dollars. So those are phones that, after three months, If you use WhatsApp a lot, then your phone is fully blocked with things and there’s nothing you can do with that. So with that team, we build Files and we help people to free up space and became like a one billion users app; from zero to one billion. And it became the default file manager for Android right? So that’s when I decided to, okay, like now I built something from scratch at Google, became very successful, I want to go and work in totally different fields, smaller companies. And that’s when I joined Lyft and Lyft to me was this interesting mix of service design, product design. You know, it’s a marketplace with multiple types of users. You have the social interaction and the, real life business model going on behind that, which is something that Google was not really working at the space that Lyft is right now. And that’s where I learned a lot because when I joined Lyft, I saw that the way that Lyft thought about design was super, super different from the way we thought about design at Google. And then like I joined Twitter later, it was all about coming back to social and working in a product that was more established in the social space. And that was pretty interesting area to be for me because I was able to use some of the learnings that I had back at Google, but in a product that was already kind of established and have more users in the end of the day. To where I am now, where again, I feel like it’s all the circles that come back and forth now working for Brazil remotely here in US. It’s a company called Neon. So it’s a fintech banking company, which for many might not be known, but banking and digital banking in Brazil is one of the biggest space for fintech companies in the world right now. Jesse: So I’d like to rewind to that moment early in your career where you got started doing web design for the Brazilian market and then Orkut, you find yourself thrown into a different context, different kinds of design challenges. And especially designing for a much broader and more diverse audience than you had before. And then I notice as you were talking that this seems to be this recurring theme for you of trying to address these very large scale challenges for very large scale audiences that are potentially very different from you. And I’m curious about how that’s informed how you approach design as a design leader. Koji: That’s a great question. So Google was not interested in building something specific to one group of users. When we talk about like, what’s your target? At Google, we’re pretty much saying like, our target is everyone. We want to build something that works for everyone. And in one hand, this is almost, you know, impossible because, of course, like, in the world, you have so many different people and different cultures and different interests and different even perception of aesthetics, in a sense of visual design. On the other hand, if you build something that really tackles a pain very well in one place, and then you’re able to figure out how to adapt that solution to other realities, then you’re likely be able to build something that will be more successful than if you start building something that are meant to be for everyone from the beginning. If you think about even Facebook, right? Like when they started, they started as a niche kind of product for universities and then they slowly grow to what they are now. So, same thing for Google. I felt like when the products that I worked on where we try to really build something huge from the beginning, some of them, I don’t think they really worked, because we’re trying to embrace the world from the beginning. Whereas for Files, because, and I will take WhatsApp as an example too. Because WhatsApp started with a very specific pain in a very specific market that helped them to grow and scale to other markets because they’re kind of solving a pain that only existed in certain parts of the world with certain parts of users, where they lack, you know, very fast connection or the connection was laggy. And because of that, they built a very good messaging system that works pretty well, even if you’re hiking in Yosemite and the internet is not working. Whenever you go back and you have your connection back, all the messages are keyed and they will be sent. Right now, all the messaging apps, most of the messaging apps do this type of resilience over laggy connection, but back, I don’t know, three years ago, Whatsapp was a pioneer on that. And, you know, pretty much every single messaging app kind of followed that lead. Company-specific design Jesse: Another thing that you touched on in here is the difference that you noticed in the way that different companies think about and approach design. There’s a strong sense, I think, among people who work outside the Valley, that the Valley is really kind of strongly unified in its approach to product development, and they’re sometimes surprised to hear that Lyft might have a different approach to design than Google has. What did you notice there? Koji: So many things, but I’ll start with craft, the focus on craft, quality, versus speed or the balance between speed and quality. I think that changes from company to company and for certain companies, it’s part of the DNA, right? Like if you think about Apple, I’m pretty sure that Apple is not afraid of delaying things, even to an extent of being the second or the third in market. We see that with Vision Pro. In a way for them to be able to then work in something that is more finished and more refined. And you see companies like Lyft and Airbnb that maybe sits in the mid range of the scale. I think Figma probably will also fall in that category where they, have a better balance of quality versus speeds of the market. And then you have other companies which are more all about speed and it’s not that it’s wrong. You see that many of those companies are very successful and they’re able to evolve their designs over time, whenever they launch the MVP, whatever, but it just becomes part of their DNA, right? Like it’s hard to change that once established, once it’s like, two or three years old of practice. And to me, that’s the trickiest part when I join as a design leader in an organization, like, what is our way of doing design? What is quality and what is good design for us? And of course, like, that to me is connected to all the, umbrellas of design. It’s not just visual. It’s not just interaction. It’s also research. It’s also, how do we make decisions. It’s also, how do we operate with other teams. It’s also, how do we connect the go-to-market strategies to the design strategy. Like, what are the things that we care about? What are the things that we are open to make tradeoffs in terms of speed, to make sure that we deliver something that it’s on the bar that we believe our company is set to do. Peter: To the question Jesse asked earlier, there’s this assumption of kind of a monolith when it comes to Silicon Valley and tech companies. And clearly they’re different. But also I find that a lot of designers and design leaders want to think that the businesses they work for are rational, right? And they’re making decisions based on some clear framework, rational framework, that’s driven by some concept of business value. But, if that were true, then every company, well, maybe not, but I was about to say, maybe every company would work the same, right? ‘Cause if there is a rational way of running a business, then everyone should approach that business similarly in order to maximize their returns. But clearly that’s not how it works. And so I’m wondering, kind of, what you’ve unpacked in terms of these different corporate cultures, different environments, different contexts that suggest where these bars are set for design and craft and quality. Make sure it’s a fit Koji: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s an amazing question. It’s, first of all, it’s very hard. And that’s something that when I mentor, other people, I tend to say, like, the most important thing for you when you’re interviewing is to find the right place for you. It’s not just, you know, getting hired in the end of the day. One, because you can become miserable very quickly. Second, because if it’s not a fit, then, it won’t work for you, mid, long term. So, yeah. There is a few things that I learned so far. First of all, you can’t like really think that the CEO won’t make a difference, right? Like a CEO makes a lot of difference. Like how does CEO think about design makes a lot of difference. Does the CEO really care about quality in the way that you care about. I think that will be the first fit question to me. And maybe you’re not, you know, responding to the CEO directly, but if you’re just talking with the company, you can just go to YouTube and see some interviews and podcasts with that CEO. And that will give you a lot of hints of how the CEO thinks about quality, and I would not even say design, but quality in general. Then the second thing to me is just looking at the product itself, because when you look at the product, I think that’s a classical thing, right, at this point already where you can look at a product and say this is created by, you know, this team and this is created by another team and those teams clearly don’t talk to each other, right? Like that’s one thing that you can clearly identify when you look at a product. Second thing is, you know, is this product really run in a way that things are being pushed to promote things, promote specific areas or specific features. We all remember, like, the web news portals back then where they have a lot of pop ups and ads. I think those are things that you can really identify when you look at a product where teams are kind of just pushing their products in the whatever home screen or the most important part of the UI versus a product that really coordinate those things and create something that is a scalable. So those teams get their exposure, but at the same time it’s not disjoint, right? So I would say CEO and the product will tell you a lot about those things. There’s other things that I kind of feel that maybe give you the hint sometimes, but there’s so many times that I got it wrong by looking at, I don’t know, let’s say the principles, right? Like, which is beautiful to see, but then how many times you see like a company that has perfect principles or even design principles and then you join or you talk with someone who works there and they say like, Oh, no, this is just to put in a wall. That’s not real. Jesse: This issue of speed versus quality is one that I hear a lot about from my coaching clients and in a lot of cases, the way that they frame this challenge is as one of culture change. That they find themselves in a culture that tips that balance toward speed and away from quality. And they see it as their role as the design leader to advocate for a different culture and to try to drive a different culture. I’m wondering, listening to what you’re saying, whether from your perspective, that kind of culture change is even really possible. What do you think? Koji: I mean, it’s nuanced to me, because it really depends. I mean, like, let’s be clear here. Perfect to me is when you have a balance, right? It’s not like too late in the market, but it’s also not too fast in a way that you can really launch something that you’re proud of or not even proud of, because you know, I would say that you have to launch something as quick as possible so you can actually have time to learn with that. But I think what’s most important is to understand and have agreements, right? Like, and you can have that agreement even before you join a company, you can talk with the CEO, you can really understand, like, how that CEO thinks about speed versus quality and see if you have a common, you know, agreement on that. Like, do you feel like you are in the same page? And I think that helps a lot for me, like having that conversation before joining me on, it helped me a lot to just establish some agreements and some things that I use later. After I join, then it’s more about the tactic, like how do you get to that, you know, agreement that you already had. And I would say in this case it wasn’t that hard because I had this conversation before. And to me, it was more about how do I actually communicate that decision to the rest of the team, to the rest of the other VPs and the other organizations. And that can be done by, and in my case was more about like creating processes where we have design reviews, we have certain mandates where we don’t launch anything until it’s approved in a design review. Which I know is not the default for many companies, but it’s something that we decided that it would be important for us because the bar was so low and we really wanted to raise the bar for design at Neon. Maybe in a different company where design is already high quality, maybe that’s not needed. And that’s something that I would say it’s important to have as an agreement as you start your role the leadership. Working at Neon Peter: This is awesome. I’d love to dig into Neon since you’ve brought it up. You’ve been there a couple of years now. You’re the chief design officer. What does that mean? Where are you in this organization? Who are you reporting into? Size of the org? Just situate us in your current context. Koji: Yeah, so my team right now is 33 people. I report directly to the CTO. I reported most of the time to the CEO, but we had a change of structure where CEO was having too many reports. I think it’s another common theme. And now I’m reporting directly to the CTO. In terms of how I spend my time, I would say like 50 percent on working with the VPs and other C levels in the company to, you know, understand structure, understand the business, what direction we’re taking, how my team can help on that direction, and 50 percent of time working with my team to really, like understand where we’re going in terms of execution and making sure that the quality level is being kept. That first 50 percent is also spent with like presenting to leadership things or presenting, you know, the thing that we just did. We just launched a new version of the app in the beginning of this year. And that began by myself presenting to the board what the vision for this new web would be. That was about a year and a half ago. So one year, and a few months to put the vision to a closure, I would say because we started implementing the first steps, let’s say five months after the first speech. Peter: And you’re in San Francisco. Where is your team located? Koji: So, We started a office here in the Bay Area. We have 30 people in us right now. CTO is here. CPO is here. We have a small office in San Mateo. But most of the company is in Brazil and the CEO is there. Some VPs are there. I would say the company is 2000 people. So then you can tell that we’re minority here in us. From Brazil to the US and back again Peter: One of the themes Jesse and I have been pursuing this past season is design leadership outside of the United States. And one of the reasons we were interested in talking to you is your experience leading design in Brazil, coming to the United States, learning kind of how design and design leadership operates here, and now, even though you’re still physically located in the United States, you’re working with a Brazilian company or you’re engaging with what I’m assuming, correct me if I’m wrong, is a different corporate culture, different kind of approach to how things are done. And I’m curious, just kind of how that’s been as part of the journey, kind of situating yourself, not just necessarily in a business culture, but like that broader social culture and what you’ve had to navigate, maybe what you learned that you’ve been able to bring back, what you’ve had to let go of in order to embrace, kind of, your new reality. Koji: I love that question. Yeah, Brazilian culture is so different in many sense and I’ve been here in the U.S. 10 years. I feel like I’m not even 100 percent Brazilian anymore. Like I’m, you know, when you’re an immigrant you say like you live between worlds, right? Like you’re not here and not there. So first of all, Brazilians are definitely a more relationship-based, workforce. Even here like there is a different between East coast and West coast. I would say that we’re more West coast than East coast for sure, in terms of culture, in terms of how we work. But even more, even more closer, I would say. Then the second thing that to me was a big shift is just like how companies operate in general. In Brazil, there is so many, and I think here too, like, when you look at especially the smaller companies, the startups, they tend to just grab a specific framework and be so tied to that framework, and try to like replicate every single thing of that framework. And I think Scrum is probably one of those frameworks that were kind of produced everywhere. And for some reason people thought that it was a default in Silicon Valley, when in reality, like most of the companies I work for, they never use anything from Scrum outside of a standup you know? And same thing happened with the Spotify squads. Spotify launched that post about squads and all of a sudden, all the companies were building squads and, you know, the reality of squads to me is, imagine you’re going to a party, you have a squad that is cleaning the floor, a squad that is, you know, fixing the dinner, a squad that is you know, working with the beverage, and the floor is super dirty, the food is done, the beverages are ready to drink. But nobody is helping the, floor sweeping squad because they’re not from that squad. You know, that’s the most common issue I see with squads is that they feel like they can’t do anything else other than that specific problem, space, or even feature, which is the worst because, you know, initially squads were not even meant to be a specific feature. And now they’re locked in in that feature that may not even have a market fit, because they’re supposed to be in that squad. So you know, all these frameworks, I think, they have good things, with squads, you have autonomy, you have great sense of ownership, but they all have limitations that when you look at a book, when you look at a blog post, those limitations are not stressed. And when you go to Brazil, for instance, and you go to a smaller startup, they lack references and they just grab that book or grab that blog post and replicate it a hundred percent. Whereas the outer maybe just did that once or maybe saw that working in three, four companies, but might not work for you. So that’s. That’s the most common issue that I saw in terms of culture once I joined smaller companies, but also working with Brazil. Jesse: As I reflect on these examples of cultural breakdown that you’re talking about, it’s interesting to notice the role that alignment plays in this. And keeping teams aligned around common purpose, and for the leader just stepping into an organization, as you touched on earlier, the importance of vetting and validating that you as a leader are in alignment with the intentions of the larger organization, the philosophy of the larger organization, how they measure success, what constitutes good, what constitutes done, those kinds of things. And I’m curious about, especially outside your own team, cross-functionally, how you build that alignment, especially from your seat at the executive level. Koji: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many ways to me. It’s all about, you know, really understanding each other, really like building empathy and understanding. That everyone in the leadership team, they have their own struggles. And finding a way to help each other and to really, like, understand where our shared language or where our shared goals are… Jesse: mm hmm. Koji: …those to me are most important things to do. There’s no recipe to do this. It’s just, like, time, a lot of, like, one on ones, a lot of get togethers, a lot of, like, hard conversations and tough discussions. That’s the only way to figure out where to be. I would say a lot is through understanding that people have no clue and that’s okay, what design is, right? Like design is such a specific discipline that people imagine what design is and they think that design is all this like magic or artistic thing that come out of nothing and we build something brilliant, right? Like, which is not true. We all know that design is a lot of like research, is a lot of like understanding the users. It’s a lot of iteration and, you know, polishing things over time. It’s learning and it’s not a recipe that you can replicate every time or you solve this problem before you can just apply it again. It’s not, like that. So just having the time to, and the patience to really like be open to any type of question to be open to bring people to your process and make them part of your process. Those are the things that worked for me so far. And I think I will definitely continue to do and try to learn new ways to do too. Peter: In these past two years at Neon, how much of your time have you had to spend educating about design? It sounds like you haven’t had to do much evangelizing. The sense I got when you mentioned the agreement that you had, like, even before you joined, was that they were bought in to at least what they thought design was, but it also sounds like since you’ve been there, there’s been a process of helping them understand all the things that design could be delivering: the distinct values, the processes and approaches. Is that something you’re having to spend a lot of time communicating and expressing, or is it, I could also imagine it’s something that you’re, like, you know what, we’re going to do what we do. You know, I’m not going to try to impose my value system, my processes on you. I’m here to deliver outcomes. Tell us what we’re trying to drive towards and we’ll get there. Like how do you navigate just how much to share about design? Educating others on design Koji: Yeah, on the first part, yeah, I’m privileged because I have a CEO who is, you know, into design. He was a designer for some years, so he really cares about quality design and building something that works well for our users, which is great. And he really understand users. He talked with the users every day, pretty much. So I’m privileged in that area of not being needing to be an advocate for design, which is totally different from Google, by the way, which is an engineering driven culture, and we had to do this all the time. Now for education, I think, like, as a designer, I saw myself doing this my whole career from an IC at Google and talking with, like, a PM that just joined Google and never worked with a designer to today with VPs that really didn’t have much contact with design that much in the past. And I would say it’s going to be our second nature for a couple of years still. The way, I think it’s been kind of helpful is to have someone on design ops or a group of people on design ops helping to build that, you know, internal training slash communication slash education about design. So we have materials on onboarding, like, whenever someone joined a company, everybody goes through the same process and we have a presentation about design. We have, you know, internal trainings about accessibility and trainings for our team too, just to make sure that they’re level those skills and we continue to grow in specific areas. So right now we have a small team on design ops that takes care of all this internal education. And that helped me a lot. Jesse: I’m really intrigued by the fact that you have considered these educational activities an extension of the mandate of operations. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I do think that it’s hard to bring people along with processes if they don’t understand the thinking that goes into them. You know, you were talking about the challenge of leveling up your cross functional partners in their awareness, in their sophistication, in their understanding. And I work with so many leaders who get frustrated by these relationships, and they get frustrated by the fact that nobody else understands design as well as they do, and nobody else has as sophisticated an understanding of what makes good design as they do. And my response to that is always like, you’re the design leader, you should be the one who has the most sophisticated understanding of design in the room. But there is a certain skill set in bridging that gap with people who don’t have that level of sophistication. So the ops team is running all of this stuff on your behalf to help drive this awareness, drive this sophistication of understanding. Where do you step in? Koji: One of the things that we started doing, and this is a theme in my career, is to give visibility to research. Giving this ability to research, not in a way of like, oh, here’s a research team, this is what they’re doing, but more like, here are users. We’re talking with them this week, this is what we learned. Or, hey, tomorrow we are talking with users, anybody in the company can join and watch us talking with them. Or you know, we’re doing this research trip end of the year. All the VPs and execs are invited and we’re going to a specific part of Brazil and we’re talking with our users and hearing their pains. This is something that first time I did this was at Google when I was working with emerging markets and I had a team and as you can imagine, you know, very diverse. I have people in U.S. who were never had the experience of living in a third world country. So I took all the VPs, directors to the field to talk with the users in a favela in Brazil. So that was such a, you know, eye opening moment because they saw with their own eyes and they started to have their own insights of like, how are we going to solve this problem? then we did the same one work at Lyft. Twitter. We did some of that, but because we had like the lockdown moment. We didn’t have in person. And now if neon we’re doing that same work to bring, you know, the company closer to the users, not only products or design or engineers, but in general, the company to hear firsthand What the users care about, you know, their struggles, their feedback and so on and so forth. So that helps a lot to just bring that shared knowledge and the shared goal of solving specific challenges. And I see people going on and commenting and saying like, Oh, I saw that video. Like, I think we can help in this way or that way, you know, so it becomes a simple thing you can do that I think is really powerful. Equitable design Peter: There is some critical commentary within design and user experience around a certain kind of colonial mindset, right? Extracting understanding from them. Building something to sell it back, where power dynamics can be fraught, right, in terms of the people who are showing up, wearing nice starched shirts, and the people they’re talking to… not, and I’m wondering how you think about this, how you navigate this, how you help others. Maybe first at Google, because I can imagine there were a lot of folks in Mountain View who really wouldn’t know how to show up. It’s probably less of an issue at Neon since that seems to be the intent of the company to begin with. But something I think many of us have learned over the last three or four years is, to approach these circumstances with a much greater degree of sensitivity and awareness than, at least, Jesse and I had 20 years ago when we were starting doing this work. And I’m wondering how you think about this how you make sure that like those dynamics feel equitable and not at odds or where one group showing up with just so much more power than any other. Koji: I love that question. So, as you can imagine for me as being a Latino here, that’s a very important topic for me. I feel like the only way to do that in a fair game is by having a very diverse team. And as much as possible to have representatives of that specific community in your team. I’m saying as possible because of course like if you’re doing research in a favela, hopefully you’re not hiring someone that you’re not being able to pay a fair salary to be able to move on to a better housing, you know. But, you have a lot of people who came from you know, very humble backgrounds. And my feeling is that, and myself included here, I think that experience for me kind of made me feel way closer to the problem. And I think there’s a difference between, I always say this, looking at a report and just saying, Oh, this is what they feel. That’s a problem. Versus, like, being there once and really, being in that type of situation, let’s say living in a favela, for instance, knowing the violence, knowing how it is to wake up every day and not having clean water, versus just reading that in a document. having people from diverse backgrounds in your teams. It’s a qualitative level to that lived experience that it’s very hard to capture by just doing research. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do every time I join a team that is working in specific communities, is to have that diversity embedded in the team, which is easier said than done, that’s what I would say it’s something that I strive for. Jesse: I notice that frequently when you talk about the value that your teams deliver, you’re talking about it in terms of customer insight. And really connecting product strategy to the patterns that you’ve discovered among your users. And it’s interesting because these insight driven practices are kind of a little bit up in the air these days. Product teams are building increasingly robust research practices. Design teams are often being asked to set aside all of that insight gathering stuff and focus on optimizing for delivery. What do you see as kind of where this is headed for the role of insight in design, in design teams and in design’s value proposition? Koji: Again, I feel I’m lucky because, you know, my team is design, research, and content. So you know, we own that whole spectrum. Jesse: Right. Koji: But one thing that I would say is that with research, our goal is also democratize internally, by one, giving visibility, but also training people to do research. Because we feel that in the end of the day, we want everyone to be able to talk with users. I think there’s always the question of bias, of course, like if you’re building something, you’re biased and you’re asking a specific question that may be biased. But in the end of the day, it’s inevitable at this point with the market, how people are coached to be PMs, for instance, they’re asked to be talking with users. So it’s better to have that with some training that not you just, like, do that recklessly. So that’s one thing. The other thing to me is, I think it’s my duty as the leader of the organization to push my team and work with my peers to make sure that my team has a space to not just be pixel pushers, right? Like, I keep saying we’re strategic partners. design is not just pixels. There’s so much more about it. And yes, we should deliver fast. And I think in the end of the day, that’s what the business needs are, right? Like, and that’s why sometimes it’d be just, like, focus on the execution and do it. But we also are not here just to design the surface, right? Like there’s way more beyond that. So it’s not an easy conversation, but again, I would urge people who are looking to join a new company to not let that discussion just go over after they join, but do this before. ‘Cause when you do that before, then you’re able to identify, like, is this the right place for me? You know, if enough good leaders are not you know, accepting places where design is being reduced to pixels, then I think there’s maybe some hope. Peter: You’ve mentioned a few times to understand the nature of the company that you’re joining, and that your values are aligned, and you did talk about having an agreement, I think, as part of the conversation when joining them. But what was it specifically about Neon that you were connected to that you felt you could kind of go all in on. What was that? And how did you realize that? Koji: A few things. One, I was doing a lot of free mentorships during the pandemic. Mostly with underserved communities, end up doing a lot for Brazilians. And I felt like, Oh my God, I wish I could do this full time because, you know, it feels good to get back to the community that I came from. So that was the first thing that I had in my mind. Second thing is, when I start to talk with the CEO and CEO was a person who hired me. He had two things in his head. One was like, I want to redesign, rebuild this thing from scratch, because this is five years old and I want you to join and just rebuild it. And I’m not a person who is in love with just keep things going. I’m more like a transformational, like zero to one person. Like, I like to change things. And I think I’m better at this than just keep things going. And then second, he really wanted me to rebuild the team culture, rebuild what is good design for the company, what means to launch a good quality product. We didn’t have a CPO for the most of the time I’m here. So I did some work as a, hybrid CPO, too. Like, the first PRD template was created by me, things like that, very operational things, to even more broad, like, how do we operate as a team together with PMs was also something that I helped to build a lot here. So, yeah, I think it’s very rare to see a company of this size kind of wanted this amount of change, right? So it’s very specific of the space that Neon is in the Brazilian market. The challenge of change Peter: Even though it sounds like the CEO asked for change, other people in the organization asked for change, you mentioned you like being involved in these transformations, what I’ve seen is even when people ask for it, when faced with the reality of change, with the implications of change, you meet a lot of resistance, right? So they’re coming to you, like, we want better design. You’re an amazing design leader who’ve worked at these great Silicon Valley companies. I’m sure the conversation was, bring us some of that Silicon Valley style design to what we’re doing here. And you might’ve told them ahead of time. Well, this is what it means. But then when you’re in the mix and you aren’t going to launch something because it doesn’t meet a quality bar, or you need to change literally like how PM works with design, works with engineering from a process standpoint, you know, and they’re like, but this is how we’ve always done it and it’s worked fine. And you have to tell them, well, but, in order for design to be its best, we need these changes that others are bringing, right? How has that gone? Or as a former guest said, change is not for the faint of heart. So how has that been navigating transformation, even with an organization that’s asked for it? Koji: Yeah, I have a friend that tells me like, Oh, I think you like to suffer. Yeah, I mean, a lot of ambiguity and a lot of hard work. I would say that when you get to the reality of change, when you get to the reality of like, okay, this is where we’re going, even after presenting to the board and the board, you know, went back to the CEO and say, like, when we’re launching this, even after having that moment, I think we have like seven VPs, five different business areas. So it’s tough because it’s a relatively small company, but we’re already divided in different goals and all this business areas have different KPIs. And guess what? Design KPIs are not there, so it’s not necessarily something that they would be rewarded for if they work in a redesign or in a new home screen, for instance, because they’re focused on credit cards or they’re focused on loans or other things. So, and I would credit, you know, the talk that Brian Chesky gave on the Figma event last year, Jesse: hmm. Koji: And to me, the most important part that he talked about there was not, PMs, that’s not the part that I really thought it was important for me, but designers working directly with engineers, those two paired up together, make things very quickly. And I got that video, I talked with the senior leadership and I said, like, we need to create a tiger team if we really want to build something new right now. Because I tried before, was to work with the different organizations within the company to build a new product, a new app. And it was so difficult because again, like, they’re rewarded by different KPIs organized by their business units and focus on the business side of things, but they’re not looking at, you know, the holistic view of what the product could be. And honestly, in the end of the day, we just launched and we’re seeing improvements in pretty much all metrics. There’s some metrics that either are neutral or unclear, but there’s so much improvements in metrics that we didn’t thought about in the beginning because, you know, when we’re moving so many pieces together with a redesign the impact is huge. It’s not just one specific area. But, in the end of the day, we end up creating this tiger team. It started with design only, we got front-end engineers, who were pretty much prototypers in the beginning, just building like a usable prototype, but without back-end. And then later, we got the back-end joining the Tiger team. And that’s where we rebuild the app. Some parts, very important parts of it from login to home screen to onboarding. And slowly that is helping a lot of the other teams to look at this new surface and to look at it as a new bar and change their own flows. Jesse: What’s one question that’s on your mind a lot these days as a design leader. Koji: Wow, so many questions, trying to pick one. I love design and I love the umbrella of what’s under design with all this gen AI things, all the change to 2D and potentially changing to 3D in the future for design. I’m very curious about, like, Where are we going in terms of organizations, in terms of specialties, like, you know, will content design change? Will research change? Will product design be more focused on specific areas? Where are we going terms of future, in terms of even visual design, instance, which is something that I would say for me personally, like, I when I got into UX, I kind of negated visual design a lot. kind went against visual design a lot. Like, yeah, visual design is something that I don’t care about because, know, the whole user experience more important. Now I think we’re seeing that visual design is having coming back. It’s been very hard to actually find good visual designers in the market. I’m also curious if we’ll have another, separation again of visual design roles versus interaction design roles like we had in the past. There are so many unknowns for me in the space right now. There’s so many changes going on right now. And I think that excites me and makes me a little bit nervous at the same time. Jesse: Fantastic. Koji, thank you so much for being with us. Koji: Thank you so much. Very happy to be here. Appreciate it. Peter: Yes, thank you. This has been great. Jesse: Koji where can people find you on the internet if they want to connect with you? Koji: Alright, so I think the best way to find me is LinkedIn right now. So if you look up for Koji Pereira you will find me there, to post sometimes and where my business profile is right now. And yeah, I think that’s pretty much it at this point. Jesse: All right. Thank you. For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Some errors may remain. Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,  Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way,  Peter: Navigating the opportunities  Jesse: and challenges  Peter: of design and design leadership,  Jesse: On today’s show, Vuokko Aro, VP of Design for the UK’s popular digital-only bank Monzo, joins us. We’ll talk about shifting your design approach as your company scales, building a true peer relationship with product leadership, and creating a sense of togetherness for remote and embedded teams. Peter: Hi Vuokko, thank you so much for joining us. Vuokko: Hi guys. Thanks for inviting me. Peter: We’re going to start where we always start which is to learn a little bit more about you. So, who are you? What do you do? What’s your role? Give us a little background. Vuokko: Absolutely. So I’m Vuokko VP design at Monzo, which is a digital-only bank. It’s a scale-up based in London. And I’ve been on this startup scale-up journey since the early days and have scaled myself with the company. And before this, I was at other startups in London, New York. I have a kind of a strange background, where I have a master’s in design, but before that I actually studied economics. I have an MBA, which used to be a fun fact about me. No one would ever know, but actually as I’ve progressed in my career, especially the startup that took off being a bank, it has become pretty useful. I would say that I can, I can help lead the company without adult supervision. Peter: You, got your MBA before your design degree. Vuokko: I did. Yes. Peter: That’s the reverse of many of the design leaders we talked to. Vuokko: Yes. Why design? Jesse: I’m curious about the pivot for you. What drew you to design? Vuokko: Mm, yes. It’s a good question. Well, I’m one of those people who’ve always done creative things since like a young age, just drawing and designing things and, I don’t know, high school, someone needed a hoodie, I would design it. At my school of economics, if we needed to make a magazine, I would do the layout in InDesign. So I guess it was just always a calling. But earlier on at the time when I was starting to choose a career, it didn’t seem like a real one yet, at least if you ask my parents. I think I chose something more traditional and then ended up drifting to it anyways. I worked as a journalist, a copywriter, concept designer, drifted into full time design when the, actually when the iPhone was released and touch devices became a thing and that was very exciting that you could touch these things and actually people would feel things through those. So that’s how I made the leap. Peter: Interesting. I hadn’t realized just how much of your journey was also Monzo’s journey, and I think kind of charting that path could be interesting. But to set a little bit more context, you mentioned Monzo’s a digital-only bank. How many people use it, and in what parts of the world is it used? Vuokko: Yes. We’re mainly UK-only now. We’re starting to work on our US product as well, but it’s very early days. But in the UK we are a household brand. People are very passionate about it. It’s the kind of thing, it’s funny. Outside the UK, people have not heard of Monzo, and in the UK, you can’t tell anyone you work at Monzo without hearing so much love and excitement about it, and we have this, like, iconic, hot coral, we call the color hot coral, debit card, and everyone knows it, so we’ve got a big consumer brand.  We’re also a social network, in my opinion, because every Monzo customer has 37 contacts on Monzo to send payments to and so forth. When I joined, we were a prepaid card. That’s how we got going just to build the product out in the open. The original team, which I’m not part of the original team. I just joined early. The original team started applying for a banking license, but already started building the product to learn from customers and to like start finding product-market fit early on. And then we got the banking license and then built the bank app on top of that. So the earliest version of the product was kind of like a Venmo. But for the past five, six years, more than six now, we’ve built loans and overdrafts and investments now. The goal is not just a bank, but, the interface to all your money, basically, which is a lot of complexity for us to handle and make simple for our customers. Design’s journey at Monzo Jesse: So you mentioned you were not part of the founding team. Where were they on their journey when you joined the company? Did design already exist as a function or were you the first designer or like how did that go when you were stepping into this? Vuokko: Mm hmm. Design already existed and, the first few designers were amazing, so they had set a really strong foundation already. There were three designers when I joined, and I came from other startups, I had designed other consumer apps, so came in to build a delightful consumer experience and looked across the whole app and things have scaled from there, so started managing every other designer who came after me, and introducing design critiques and design culture and all that good stuff.  So taken from there, we were less than a hundred people in the company when I joined. Maybe a hundred thousand users. There had been hockey stick growth just before I joined, and a nice funding round so they could hire me and some other people. Jesse: Did they bring you in in a leadership role? Vuokko: No, I joined as a lead product designer, I think. Although the company was very flat at the time, there were no leadership roles other than the founders, really. Jesse: Yeah, so they needed to create a leadership role for you at some point. How did that come about? Vuokko: Yep. So we had our original head of design, Hugo, who’s amazing. And he was the first designer. And then I joined and did my thing and have been on a journey from that time when we didn’t really have any titles or no one cared, to, as we scaled up, created a director level and that became me and then VP. Jesse: Mm. That’s been, six, seven years.  Peter: When you were director level, was that the senior most role? As things have scaled, have you been scaling kind of on top with that? Vuokko: No, Hugo, the original designer, was VP design for a while, maybe a year, two. But before he left, I became VP and then that’s been the last however many years. Peter: Couple of years according to LinkedIn. Jesse: Was that previous VP one of the founders? Vuokko: No, but he was there from day one.  Jesse: What was it like to step in as the, kind of, the second leader? You know, like you’re inheriting something, but it’s not yet what it needs to be? What was that like? Vuokko: Yeah. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, to be honest. It was one of those times in a startup where everyone’s doing everything from, like, jumping on customer support if there’s a problem, or packing cards in the office if a lot of signups happened the previous day, so we were just doing things together, but I think I also had the privilege of learning with him and he was out there on the frontier and I could watch what he did and learn very quickly as well. I think I was at the right point in my career where I had enough maturity to watch and learn quickly and then do whatever was needed. That’s the thing in scale-ups. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for anyone to take a lot of responsibility, but it’s not always the right time for different people. It’s a high level of discomfort when you don’t know what you’re doing and you have to figure out the next step and the next step. So I guess you have to be ready for it to put in the work. No victim mentality Peter: You mentioned Hugo kind of being out in front, what were some of the things that you learned that you saw that maybe were, eye-opening for you as he was operating, and maybe that you’ve adopted in your leadership?  Vuokko: Great question. I think one thing that I always respected about Hugo was he didn’t have any kind of victim mentality about design is not respected, or design needs to sit at the table. He was very grown up about it and just showed people what the impact of design had been to the success of a feature or a phase in our story, and kind of took it apart and explained like this is how it works. It’s not just magic that happened. We put in this effort and then this was the outcome of it. So I think I’ve learned that a lot, now that I represent design in rooms where I’m the only designer and other people don’t have my background, is to not be preachy about it or complain-y, but just… people love learning about this stuff anyway, it’s fascinating.  I think I learned that kind of open mindedness about just being excited, about teaching, about design and you kind of can’t overdo it. There’s always more for all of us to understand and learn. Jesse: Mm hmm. So you’ve referred a couple of times to this business as a scale-up opposed to a startup. So implying that it’s gotten to a phase in its evolution where growth really, really matters. And I’m curious about what you see as the difference between design’s role in the startup phase versus design’s role in the scale-up phase of a new business. Vuokko: Yes. A lot of differences, a lot of similarities. I suppose early on it’s much more about creating new things and not everything’s going to be good. And now we’re getting to a phase where the brand is very valuable and we can’t risk just destroying it overnight. For example, where in the past we would do a lot of things and just see what works, and now we’re in a phase where we’re really defining what it is, who we are, and maturing a lot of things. Which is different, but still we’re clearly not at a phase where we’ve stagnated. We’re still creating new things just with a more careful approach, but still need to move fast and be bold about it. I think we used to take massive leaps and now we still take leaps, but I think that’s my biggest fear as well, that one day we slow down to a crawl and stop innovating, but that’s not. I can’t believe I used the word innovate, but you know what I mean. Yeah, so still creating, but with like knowing that all of this is actually very valuable. Product *and* brand design Vuokko: Now one thing about my role that I forgot to say is I look after product design, user research and brand design. So I think about the customer experience in a very wide sense. So thinking about the app, if… when we redesign it…I’ve done that a few times now… obviously breaking metrics and taking a leap into the unknown, those are huge things, but also changing the brand and the visual brand, for example, like refreshing it, and how will this change the sentiment of people who interact with all of these things. I’ve been on many startups before, but I’ve never gotten to this phase before where we have to be this careful. Which is, I’m not saying that as a bad thing, it’s actually, it’s what a privilege. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: Had you done brand design, marketing design before, or is this new for you in this role? Vuokko: I’ve done it before. I think I’ve actually gravitated towards startups where brand and product are very intertwined. So, just before this I was at Citymapper, which is another London startup which is huge here. Less so… It exists in the US, so maybe some people will know it. But also very much a strong brand and charismatic product, kind of intertwined. And I suppose I’m old enough to have worked in design when there wasn’t that much of a separation yet between brand and product, as there is now with younger people coming into the industry only having, for example, studied product design and worked in very tightly developed and matured roles, I think. At some point I was quite drawn to early stage work where you do everything. Peter: What I see that’s unfortunately common is, as companies scale, design, which had product and brand together, ends up getting separated because some new marketing leader comes in and that marketing leader wants the design team to report to them. Have there been any of those kinds of conversations or has it been recognized that design is more powerful when it’s all together? How have you navigated those discussions? Vuokko: We have had that discussion. It was a few years ago, actually, that that did come up and I… it was the first time I very forcefully put my foot down in what I believe we should do. And it was a discussion for a while, but ultimately I think we have enough proof points at Monzo, just the power of, I would say design is our moat, or at least one of the strong moats we have as a business, where it’s kind of not disputable that design is what draws people to use the product, to work at our company, all of these things. And it’s not just how easy the product is to use, or the card and the visual brand, but all of it, how it works together. I just look towards examples of where that worked and where the risks would be to separate it. I do very strongly believe that the way we build the product and the way we market it should feel like one fluid experience, and should feel like it’s made by one hand, even though we’re a large team now. But, it’s not been discussed since.  So the last few years we’ve settled into this model and I actually proactively brought this up because we hired a new CPO a year and a bit ago. And when we were interviewing candidates, I made it very clear to everyone involved that It’s absolutely not personal towards anyone, but before we even get started, I don’t want to report into a CPO either, because I believe that design is wider than just product. I look after the product experience, but also the brand and the way we talk to customers in our app, our cards or the carrier letters, everything. So to me, design being a part of product is more narrowly focused than how I see it. So that’s been the way, and I think, obviously, it always comes down to personal relationships, but I work closely with all our execs and it’s gone well. I’m very collaborative and everything, but this is the way I prefer the team to be set up. Peter: So where is design situated in the organization? Vuokko: So I report into our COO. Which I thought was like a once in a lifetime setup for design, but I listened to an older episode of yours and you had someone else on from Instacart, I think, who had the same model. And that’s been really, very fruitful relationship for me, I have to say. But it’s, I suppose, it comes down to individuals as well. Our COO is a amazing business leader who I learn a lot from. And also I’ve gotten to teach non-design execs and non-product execs about the power of design and customer centricity in ways that they might not have heard about before, so. I prefer just reporting to a business leader. Who’s also an amazing person. Jesse: So you mentioned that there are a lot of people in the industry now who have spent their entire careers solely in the realm of product design and have never been exposed to kind of this broader field of brand and graphic and identity and all of these other forms of design that come into play for you. What do you think those folks are missing? What advice or direction would you give to somebody who has a lot of depth in product, but no experience with brand, like how can they level themselves up here? Vuokko: I love that question. I think when you work in just one medium, let’s call it, you do end up solving a lot of problems over and over, a similar framing and similar problems, and it can limit your thinking. I think of what are we even doing here as a designer, or what are we solving for? So I think, thinking widely about the brand, it’s more about storytelling and really simplifying a message so that it resonates with the customer so that they notice it in like the busy life that they’re leading and they don’t really have more than two seconds for us.  And I think it’s also different kind of constraints. I think, now that I think about it, for example, when we design debit cards, it’s a tiny surface with about 100 different kinds of constraints because it’s a physical product that’s regulated and has to fit into an ATM, and when I think about being young and designing book jackets, that was a different kind of constraint and people need to notice it in a busy store. So I think just there’s a richness in thinking about different kinds of products, I suppose. Peter: At some point I had to deepen my understanding of brand, and designers, when designers think of brand, they tend to think of brand identity. But you have an MBA and there’s a whole world of brand management within the land of MBAs. And I’m wondering how you’re bringing a richer business-savvy mindset of brand into your conversation and, do you own the brand or, how is brand ownership or stewardship considered at Monzo, particularly considering how important it is? Vuokko: Yeah, I would say our brand’s owned by our COO, who has that background and is very good at it. Or marketing as well, perhaps. It’s not me. I don’t actually, I don’t own a line on the P&L. It’s a gift and a curse. Again, I think it comes from also me being one of the most tenured employees and being the one person left who’s created the product and the brand kind of from scratch and been here the whole journey that I have this outside voice as well, defining when we work on brand pillars or a brand proposition that I have a big voice there just because I have this track record of having created it and understood what works. Made some mistakes, too. But yeah, the MBA background I think definitely helps. I, I don’t think about it enough sometimes, but it is very much, I suppose, part of my internal vocabulary that I take for granted. Influence without accountability Peter: I’m assuming you have points of view and perspectives that you’re trying to advocate for. And so how do you justify or rationalize or advocate for positions when you’re not seen necessarily as accountable? Vuokko: Mm hmm. Yeah. I think if I had to kind of distill it down to one, I care about quality of experience in different ways. And obviously there’s, I think this has been a hot topic on a lot of podcasts recently, about things that you can measure and things that you can’t. But I think that’s kind of the role that I want to bring and having a tenured design leader, I feel like there’s that trust that I don’t feel held back by the lack of metrics. And obviously I’m very privileged to work in a company where design has clearly been the driving factor in our success. So much so, you know, our investors and board and everyone knows it. Jesse: Has everyone always known it or was it a journey to help people understand the value that design was delivering for the organization? Vuokko: I wouldn’t say everyone’s always known it, I’m sure. And, I want to be clear that design is not the only reason for success. We have an amazing tech stack that we built from the ground up and amazing team. There’s a lot of things, but design is clearly one of these major factors.  No, it doesn’t come free, that’s for sure. For example, I’ve been lucky to have been invited to talk at a board meeting about how we do design at Monzo and what our role is and how it differs from other companies and give examples of what we’re working on. We had defined our long term company strategy, I got to be involved and bring my point of view. Which at the end of the day, it’s absolutely not at odds with someone with a long term career in banking either. It’s we all want to build amazing things for our customers that they will use and love. But I think it’s introducing new people to that vocabulary and obviously, like, our exec team, for example, everyone joined in the last three years, board members change ,we have new investors every now and then, so it’s not like it’s a set group either. Educating others about design Vuokko: Sometimes I kid myself and think everyone at Monzo understands design, but then next week someone will join who’s never worked with a design team like ours, that’s so empowered and opinionated. So I think it’s not like the job’s ever done either. Like you can be in a place where things are just about as good as they can be, but still you have to keep educating people. That sounds condescending though, I don’t mean it that way. But kind of explaining the craft and, why it’s different here. Peter: What are some of those talking points of difference? You mentioned both, to the board, you’ve given presentations on how design at Monzo is different, and now to people joining, maybe as kind of part of onboarding, how the role of design at Monzo is different than whatever you assume their expectations are. So what is that delta? How do you frame that? Vuokko: Yeah. That’s a good question. I guess you never also know what other people’s, where they’re actually coming from and what their actual expectation is. But I suppose, like, a stereotype, that’s out there that I remember myself, someone could have is that design is just something that comes in at the end and decorates the thing. Or that it’s somehow detached or part of marketing, or that it’s not actually as embedded as it is. So I talk about how we work, just the process of how we structure cross discipline tech squads and the role of a designer working closely together with the other disciplines, and well, I think we’ve also invested a lot when it comes to being different. We’ve invested in user research a lot in Monzo over the years, over the last year or two more than before, and we’ve always been very customer centric. But in the early days we had no user researchers, we hosted events and we’re very, like, community-centric product.  So in the early days we had events. It was hard to get out of the office without a slice of pizza because we had people over every night to test the product, to hear about how we build it, the thing. It was like a very Shoreditch, the kind of tech neighborhood of London, Shoreditch thing in the early days that I remember well. Since then, well, like our customer centricity has obviously taken new directions. Like that group was a very specific group. A lot of engineers who then later on joined us, customer, like, community forum. But since then, like, we obviously developed a user research discipline, but we’re really invested in it now, to get back to answering your question. I feel like research at Monzo has really reached levels that I certainly haven’t seen in my career before, and like we have an amazing research director who’s built a team and has been able to connect them to our strategy in ways that they impress me all the time. For example, we’ll set out to build one thing, but research just comes up with this insight that will actually build a completely different thing that then blows everyone’s socks off. So I think when it comes to like first principles thinking and, and all of that, those are the things that make us special, even within tech.  Jesse: I talk to design leaders all the time, both within my coaching practice and just generally out in the world who I feel like would kill for the opportunity to get in front of their board of directors and make the case for the value of design. And they can’t get there and they can’t do it because they don’t have anybody to invite them in. They don’t have anybody who feels like that conversation merits that level of attention. So I’m curious about how you got into the room, the executive level alliances that you’ve been able to build, to maintain what you’ve built, because I’ve seen so many design leaders who’ve been able to, to gather a certain amount of power and influence for themselves, and then had it all kind of like dissipate, drain away over time. Vuokko: Yes. Yeah. I am in a great position. it didn’t happen overnight. I think I’ve learned to do different things. Some of them, not to keep banging on about the MBA, but I think just speaking their language as well and well, speaking the language of execs, and bringing my own flavor.  No one wants to hear more of the same. I think the reason you get invited to a room, you make sure that you’re actually providing new perspective and value and then if that happens, you’ll be invited again and again, and you build piece by piece.  I think of myself as a really good writer and I write a lot internally, I write weekly updates and I write about this and that, so I think that was one of my ways in was to write vision papers and papers about how we design magic customer experiences, and those kind of things click with people about this is the, like, behind why… our success or why we’re growing or why people continue opening the app every day and all of these things. So I think, yeah, it’s a mix of fitting in, but also bringing that unique perspective. I suppose it’s another kind of cross disciplinary team. I always love being in a product squad and working with engineers and other people. So I have a kind of a new cross disciplinary squad now. So just to remember my unique perspective and always bring it. I don’t ever want to be in a room and just nodding. I feel like then that’s probably the best way to never get invited again. It’s to really focus on, like, what is the unique thing that you can bring, with your experience and skills. And we have amazing customer centric execs, but obviously having a design background helps you articulate things and, make connections maybe that aren’t there for everyone. Maximizing the impact of design Jesse: So you’re working with this amazing team that really understands what you bring, the value of it. I can’t imagine that you see eye to eye all the time. And I get curious about the challenges that you face, still, in, maximizing the impact of design, maximizing the value delivery of design. Vuokko: Yes. Yeah, it’s, we wouldn’t have jobs if it was easy and automatic. So it is definitely, there are definitely decisions to be made. And I think it often comes down to everyone wants high quality. Everyone wants consistency and everyone also wants to move fast. So I think it’s often a case of, what’s good enough? How far do we reach? Or do we just go with what we can have in two months, or now? And then what kind of commitment do we make to getting back to that?  Jesse: Lot of those kinds of decisions come back to, in the simplest terms, the roadmap, what’s getting built on what timeline. And I’m curious about how design influences the roadmap for Monzo.  Vuokko: Yeah, great question. Different ways. For example, we have user researchers obviously working on product, embedded in squads on more delivery projects, but also going ahead, investigating different topics, or often we might pair a user researcher and then, like, a business analyst, for example, to go and get clarity on what kind of opportunities there are. And then I’m part of our product senior leadership. So just a voice in the room, along with my directors, kind of on a regular basis. But in, in addition to that, I think the biggest part of my job is to open up big conversations about the ways that we’ll win as a company and how we structure the app and what are the new spaces we need to build and how do we support our business goals through the product. So if I explain that a little, so we did a kind of a app redesign. That rolled out this summer, but it was actually like more than a year of work for me starting to map out the problems with the top three business goals we have as a company, and what’s stopping us from reaching those, then mapping it back to the product and its structure and how people navigate through it and the feedback we’ve gotten and, obviously, a lot of work went into that and then writing a vision paper about it. Where we should take the app and its structure next.  So we’ve built a new home screen and we have some ideas, but, for example, currently, this autumn, I wrote a follow up about, well, what’s next because I think that’s the power of design as well. We can imagine the future and, like, create the direction for where we should go. Because I think there are a lot of smart people in a lot of different roles and disciplines, but a lot of them are about combining what exists already and I think what I’ve been able to bring is not just how do we optimize the space we have already, or how do we cram more things into it, or how can we do this or that, but it’s actually, you know what, we’re missing another space and this one is no longer serving us and we need to create these other things. So I always try to get ahead of it. We do, like, ahead of quarterly, or half year planning or anything like that like, way ahead, to build the excitement, alignment, understanding of where we need to go. Kind of the bigger leaps. And so far I’ve had a, good track record of seeing where the company and the business need to go. But it’s not like a lot of it’s like rocket science either. There are big patterns that other big apps have, and you combine from there, but I think, yeah, a combination of user research, being in the room regularly, and then these bigger vision pieces. But it, that’s not, just you write it and everyone is excited, of course there’s work off the back of that, but it’s now a way that we’ve done things and it’s worked. So that’s obviously each time it gets easier. Jesse: So what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that there is a tremendous amount of influence that design has over product strategy. But you don’t report into a product organization. And you are, in some ways, kind of a peer to the product organization. And I’m curious about how you manage that tension of authority and control and decision making power in the structure that you have in place here. Vuokko: Yeah, it’s a good question. Yeah, I work closely with our CPO, who I have tremendous respect for, and he has a lot of experience from different tech companies around the world. So he definitely has a lot of experience that I don’t have. And I have experience that he doesn’t have either. We have a one to one every week, and talk a lot and, align amongst ourselves. And I think we really bring different parts to the leadership of our product. So he’s very commercial. He has an engineering background. He’s an amazing product leader, but obviously I have this like experience leading our experience. So, I think he trusts me a lot on that side and it all works out. Always comes down to individual relationships, but in the end he’s more senior than I am. So that’s fine with me. Upholding quality standards Peter: You mentioned earlier the concept of quality of experience, and I’m wondering if that is a explicit bar that you have set, if there is a framework for quality that you’ve established, and if so, what does that look like? And how does that then support your conversations with your CPO, right? In terms of, I’m assuming there’s a go/no go, right? Like this doesn’t meet our level of quality, so we shouldn’t ship it. Like, how do you handle those kinds of conversations? Vuokko: Yes, great question. This is something that a few of the execs have actually asked me to define. And I haven’t done it yet. One thing I am in the process of doing is writing some product principles together with our CPO and his team. So I think that should help also defining the brand a little more. But it’s a tricky thing to pin down as well. I often try to, depending on the thing, I, try to inspire the team to aim high in ways that feel tangible. Like one designer on my team worked really hard for a half a year on a thing that’s like UI-wise, one card with an icon, but it’s just so meaningful to our customers. It’s too complex. I won’t go into what it is now, but it’s cool. But it was so industry-defining that we got a lot of press from it and how we’re keeping customers safe and this and that. So I think that was a great bar for quality of design, is the press wants to write about it, but that’s obviously very high, but then how many pieces of feedback do we get where people are just so happy they wanna post about it, or tell their friends, or whatever it is. So I think it all comes down to these things. Our growth is heavily, like, product led growth as we have organic growth. And that’s part of our big story as a company. So to keep that going, obviously we also need to have features that people want to show their friends and tell their friends about. And to keep that bar high in that sense as well.  But yeah, it’s hard. To answer your question, I don’t have a clear definition for it, other than obviously there’s a bar of like, it works as you would expect, and isn’t flaky, and the affordances are in place, and all of those. The way I’ve tried to define it is to go beyond what a customer would expect a bank to do or this feature to do so it doesn’t just work and we definitely never want to just design a slightly better version of where it’s already out there, but just go beyond, ideally. Not that it needs to be different, but to kind of be a surprisingly good.  Peter: You mentioned earlier that that Monzo is digital only. I do a lot of work with financial services and banks. And even when you’re focused on just the digital, there can be a significant complexity. I have here, I’ve written down things like service design and omni channel. And I’m wondering what your relationship is, even if you don’t have branches, are there customer service representatives, and what your relationship is to that true end-to-end experience the customers are having, so that it’s not really just what’s on a mobile app screen, but what all are you trying to orchestrate with the experience, and what is your team given, kind of, access to or responsibility for in that orchestration? Vuokko: We’re lucky to be transparent company. So designers have access to data, to customer feedback, the different channels that we use, and we have some speaking of, like, how great our user research team, they have some like always-on research channels and feedback through the product outside of it. And I think that’s one of the upsides of me reporting to our CEO is I get to be part of our Ops VP’s group. So I get exposure to, like, our VP of operations and financial crime and compliance and people who I might otherwise not spend as much time with. But obviously that’s a huge part of how we serve our customers and what, people deal with, whether the product’s working well or not. But, as for my team, we’ve embedded designers in our customer operations team. So they’re designing tooling for our customer operations, but also helping people like self-serve and do things more easily in the app. And then also in like financial crime, helping deal with things like fraud and other things that might affect our customers. We look at this pretty widely from not just the website and signing up and using the product, but also, what happens when something goes wrong. And what if people can’t find what they’re looking for in the app? What channels are they going to use to figure that out? Are they going to search in the app? Are they going to Google it, call us? So, we don’t have branches, we are digital only, so we have an in-app chat that’s always open and we have a phone number you can call. Peter: So you mentioned the Ops VPs and things like compliance and control. So again, I work with banks and usually what you would call Ops VPs, designers would see as stakeholders, right? There are people that you have to get buy in for or you have to run things by to get their sign off on, but it’s often not seen as a partnership where it sounds like you have an opportunity for a partnership. And I’m wondering how you think about the relationship with, and I don’t know enough about the UK regulatory environment, but kind of the relationship between design and regulatory controls, right? In the United States, there’s certain experiences that banks cannot offer because of federal regulations, but there’s also an opportunity for those banks to possibly work with the federal government to try to make change if it was seen as in the interest of consumers. And so I’m wondering, do you end up operating in that space of trying to change some really like fundamental aspects of banking so that it is more customer or experience centered? Vuokko: Yes yeah, we have several regulators in the UK, and they’re doing a great job, and we work with them. Earlier we were talking about, how things have changed. I feel like we were really learning to work with regulators and, and pushing back a lot, I think. But ultimately obviously, we’ve grown and matured a lot and, it’s not a direct part of my job, but I think it’s an extremely valuable context that I get about everything I wouldn’t be exposed to if I was just sitting in product, all of that is so valuable to doing my job well and giving context to my team on, for example, what the trends are that our customers might be dealing with and the cost that comes with that and all of that to the human cost to our customers, what they have to deal with and the cost to our business and all of that. I think it’s the other side of the coin almost and it’s, I’m really privileged to see it. It’s a partnership, but it’s more also just visibility, and I think it helps solve some of those problems through design. I think ultimately like having all that context soaking in my brain helps design a product that helps us serve customers better and keep them safe. Scaling UX Research Jesse: I’m curious about this investment in research specifically that you’ve been able to drive for the organization in the last few years because it sounds like something that in most cases would be basically incompatible with the thinking of a scale-up, you know, an organization that is invested in growth, invested in speed. The last thing that they want to do is take a bunch of time and do a bunch of research studies. So I get curious about how you made the case. Did you need to make the case? How did this shift toward investing in deeper customer understanding come about for the organization? And what was your role in making that happen? Vuokko: Sure. I’m not going to take too much credit for this. I mentioned earlier, we have an amazing director of user research and it’s really her understanding of the business and how her discipline can help it grow. That’s been the main factor here. What she’s done is been very pragmatic, to be honest, to start small and show the impact and grow from there piece by piece. So I think I mentioned earlier that sometimes we investigate the opportunity in a new area we might not already be in. So I’ll pair a user researcher, maybe a designer and a business analyst, for example, to just go and investigate the space and customer needs, business opportunity for a while and then come back with a recommendation. So that kind of thing obviously is very cheap compared to sending a whole squad to build a thing that might or might not meet an actual customer need. So that’s been a real valuable part of how we work and especially how we expand to doing new things. And then, good examples of where a researcher was able to really change direction and for that direction to have been the right one for us. And then suddenly you get a few of those and everyone wants some of it. Jesse: Hmm. So it seems like, tactically, this is about packaging research findings in a way that people inside the organization can consume them and getting your researchers in front of your stakeholders. Vuokko: Yeah, I think that’s definitely part of it. Then I think the research team has also done a great job of empowering everyone in squads, building product to do their own usability testing and kind of the simpler research work, which then frees up their time to do higher level things that no one else is skilled in doing. And then that then leads to breakthroughs in ways that wouldn’t have been possible if they were busy doing usability testing. Which is also valuable, but just there’s different flavors. Jesse: Yeah.  Peter: I’m wondering if you also have a content practice or how content is handled with relationship to design. Vuokko: Yeah, I think brand design being under design is surprising to many, but then another surprise is actually, I don’t have content or writing in my org at all. We have a writing discipline that sits within marketing. And I would say that’s probably for historical reasons, where we hired the first writer and then they built their team. But, like I said, we’re very collaborative, so it’s not been an issue, because of our strong consumer brand that we built, also have one of our superpowers, I think, is our social media and content team, but that’s kind of outside the product. But I’d be curious always to, like, how we can reflect all of that more within the product as well. Peter: Do those people in marketing do, like, the UX writing, are they part of that conversation? Or are your designers, some of them, doing the UX writing? Vuokko: Early on, we were pretty dogmatic about only hiring designers who were also good writers. And when we were interviewing, like, that was part of it and only hired people who care about, like, all the aspects of putting together an experience. As we scaled it was very difficult to hang on to that. So now we have designers who would probably tell you themselves they’re not strong writers, but they’re amazing at other things. And we have writers embedded in different business areas. Not maybe on a squad level, but in like we call them collectives, kind of the Spotify tribes. At least like on that level to be close to the work. It depends I suppose on the project. Sometimes there is a writer assigned to a project and making sure every thing there is up to standard and, sometimes it’s more a designer and a writer might then come in later, but it depends on the project.  I think we probably do have a lot of maturing to do there. But at least the way I talk to my team is that they are responsible for the experience in the end, so we never use lorem ipsum, for example, even if English isn’t your native language, or you don’t feel comfortable you should do your very best to convey the message and the feeling, dare I say, of what we want the customer to know and what this screen is all about. And then obviously, writers are amazing at then, like, maybe bringing that more to life and making sure it’s grammatically correct, but ultimately the designer can’t shy away from the responsibility of what like, a screening question conveys. Jesse: What’s challenging you right now? Vuokko: It’s the scale of, like, of everything getting bigger and more complex and fast around me. So I think we’re doing more things at once than we’ve ever done before. And I feel like, I guess I’ve said that every year or every few months, but it definitely feels like that now, where we built such a strong business over the pandemic. And then that’s thanks to our strong exec team who’s come in and helped us really, like, on top of this product and brand that people love, also built, like, a really strong business and we’re now profitable and we have kind of this, like, right to win and go big towards everything we’ve always wanted to do. So I think it’s obviously challenging and I think, not the flip side, but with great power comes great responsibility. It’s like we’ve been trusted as a design team to really help lead the direction and to make sure that goes well. And we help move things in the right direction. So definitely to be humble and listen to customers and make sure that we’re taking the right steps, but yeah, doing it at a scale and on many, many different fronts at once is a new experience. Peter: When you’re thinking of those scaling challenges, I’m wondering which is primary. There’s a lot of things that are kind of interwoven, but is it for you, at least, is the primary challenge one that’s more internal, just kind of building and managing and maintaining an organization that could continue to work at the level of quality and, dare I say, velocity that you’ve maintained, or is it more external, where it’s the offerings that are going out there and maintaining coherence and cohesion in a product suite that’s evolving. I’m sure they’re both problematic, but I’m curious, for you right now, where do you have to focus your energy? Vuokko: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, it’s a bit of both for sure. Maybe the former more so. So we’ve grown our team pretty quickly, and some parts of the organization have way more tenured designers than others and I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times and experienced it, but as you grow a team, all your rituals break every now and then regularly. You just have to be prepared for them to stop working and then you reinvent them. So I think we’re at another one of those points where, how do we do critiques again at this size, and how do we make sure things are consistent, and everyone shares the same view of what quality is, and all of these things. So, been there, been here multiple times before, so we’ll figure it out again.  Peter: I’m wondering what your experience is, because I know that before Monzo, you were a practicing designer. You were an IC. You know, a senior. But now within Monzo, you’ve become this organizational leader. And I’m wondering, I have a soft spot for the world of design operations, and I’m wondering how you’ve engaged that as you’ve scaled, and if you’ve embedded in design operations, how that has helped you or, what you’ve learned along the way working with design operations. Vuokko: Yes. We have an amazing research ops, person, who honestly, it could be a team of five, she’s so, smart and efficient, but we don’t have a dedicated design ops team or even person. I think early on I was influenced by, someone once said something about if you have design ops, you’ll end up rolling all your problems to them and like managers not handling enough on their own plate, which I’m also butchering that now, but I heard that a long time ago. And it stuck with me for a while, but I definitely don’t believe in it anymore, but…  Peter: I was about to say, you’re at a scale where… Vuokko: No, that’s, those days are long gone. So our research ops person used to run both research and design ops. And actually has been a huge, huge help to us, how we structure things over in product design and brand design as well. So I would say. definitely see and appreciate the value. But we are still a pretty scrappy team where we get a lot done ourselves. I do have a executive assistant support which is also like helps day to day. Jesse: We’ve talked so much about your relationships with the executives and your relationship with the founders and the leadership. We haven’t talked very much about your relationship with your team. And I’m curious about your philosophy, the leadership structures that you’ve built underneath yourself to help yourself scale as the organization has scaled. Vuokko: Yes, great question. So I have a team of about 60 people and that’s about 10 in brand design, a bit less, and then the rest split evenly across the other two disciplines. And we have three or four directors across design and research, and then a few senior managers and a few IC/manager hybrids who are doing a wonderful job early on in their careers as leaders, and then I have a principal, or staff, we just changed our naming structure, so I’m forgetting myself, but one director-level IC who’s been also very transformative for the business to have that level of experience to go in as an IC to help create clarity on what we want to do.  Jesse: You mentioned that early on, it was an environment in which everybody was participating in everything, to some extent. As an organization scales, that obviously is no longer sustainable. And for design organizations, what that often means is a shift from generalist roles early on to more specialist roles. And I’m curious about your philosophy of that shift and how you manage that shift, and when you know it’s the right time to pivot towards specialists for a design team. Vuokko: Yeah, definitely started with generalist, even there were no product or brand designers separate. Whereas, that’s now happened. I think it’s where we first felt a need for a specialist was actually within brand design, to really bring in. We’ve invested in motion design as a practice, felt like that’s something that a modern consumer app should live and breathe. So that’s a specialist skill we’ve invested in. Also being a bank, there are some things that are very unique to us, like fighting financial crime and fraud and things like this. So we hired a, for example, a specialist who’s experienced and excited about the field and it’s obviously a very specific thing to design for. But I would say mostly we still aim to hire generalist product designers who could work in any team across the company. And I think it’s also a richness to see multiple parts of it and understand how our personal banking customers use the product and also our small business customers on business banking side, for example. Ideally I’d love to continue hiring generalists. And I think it, even though we’re a bank, we’re a consumer app. So I think there’s no one set of skills that’s needed to build that. It kind of depends on what different teams are working on, I think obviously every individual has their own strengths and weaknesses. So that’s a thing that then defines how we staff different teams and what phase a certain feature or product might be in at that point, but I think definitely trying to build a diverse team of generalists, if that makes sense, where everyone brings their own background. We have some people who have studied industrial design or architecture or have no formal design education, or they might have worked in this kind of startup or company before. And we’re a pretty tight team, considering product designers are embedded in different, like, dozens of teams across the company. We do get together for rituals and have built this, like, trust, and a lot of different social and other kind of rituals, because I think it’s really important when you do creative work, it’s so important to have that team to come back to, even though you have your first team in the cross-disciplinary space, but to have people you know who share your practice and also like to give honest feedback and have that group of peers who can openly challenge decisions. And I try to be part of that team as much as I can, make myself vulnerable and not seem like a separate part of the team.  But I mentioned I write weekly updates. I talk about what’s on my mind. I try to be in the office and talk with people informally. I think it’s important for us to break down any barriers of who’s new or what anyone’s level is. We’re all designers and creating this experience together.  Maintaining connections within the team Peter: One of the challenges I see when you have designers embedded in cross-functional teams is that they start losing touch with the other designers. And you need to be very intentional about design team rituals that bring them together. And I’m wondering what are some of those intentional rituals that you’ve had to establish to kind of, counterbalance the lone designer who spends most of their time with people who aren’t designers. Vuokko: Yes. I don’t think we have any business area with just one designer now. There might be obviously a squad with one designer, but some squads even have two designers, so. But definitely it can get lonely out there. Currently we have one weekly ritual where everyone comes together and it’s a, kind of a case study and a context share that one designer or pair of designers or researchers are working on. Early on, obviously when you’re a small team, it’s easy to have million different rituals and we’ve had some very fun ones that didn’t scale. And during the pandemic, when everyone was remote, I mean, that was like a very big and intentional investment in talking with each other and having these remote things together, especially as we were hiring remotely with people who we’d never met in real life before, so that was a huge moment of investment in team rituals and culture. But since returning, I would say we’re due a reset and we’re actually working on, while we speak, there’s a meeting about resetting our design reviews, critiques and jams and how we start redoing them in a new way for a new size. Because we’re such a large team, there are starting to be different pockets of… not cultures, but ways of doing critiques more locally, but I really care about bringing everyone together. And now with the pandemic, we’ve also hired outside of London, where in the past we used to be an office space, London based team. So now one of the things we do together is a quarterly team day where I do more of a business update and I have other kind of collaborative workshops or things. So rather than before we used to do a monthly thing together, it’s too frequent when people have to travel in. So we do a quarterly thing and try to do celebrations and all kinds of things like that. Jesse: It sounds like there’s a lot to be excited about. Where all of this is going. What are you most excited about? Vuokko: I think I’m most excited about just building some new things and maturing the things we have and kind of, having been on this journey so long and there are things that we’ve talked about for years of, “later, when we can afford it” or “when we have enough customers, we can do this and that.” and now, now it’s kind of the time. So I think just, it feels really exciting to have been patient to like stay on the journey and now get to kind of also reap the benefits of all the hard work.  I’m definitely a builder and creating new things and going after new types of customers new markets all this is very exciting. Peter: Excellent. Well, thank you for joining us. Vuokko: Yeah, thanks for having me it’s really fun. Jesse: Vuokko, thank you so much.  Peter: Where can people find you on the internet? Vuokko: I’m on LinkedIn. I don’t check it too often, but I’m on there. Vuokko Aro my full name, and on most social media, my first name only. So Vuokko, V U O K K O. You can find me on Twitter, which is what I call it, and other places. Peter: Excellent. Thank you so much. Vuokko: Thanks.  Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript This transcript is auto-generated, and then hand-edited. It may contain some errors. Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,  Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way,  Peter: Navigating the opportunities  Jesse: and challenges  Peter: of design and design leadership,  Jesse: On today’s show, design leaders are feeling some major shifts in the landscape these days. In the wake of COVID and sweeping industry layoffs, leaders are facing difficult questions about the value of design, both from inside and outside the field, while new technologies and a chaotic job market make the future of the work harder to see than ever. Peter and I take some time to explore what’s going on with design leadership here in the spring of 2024 today on Finding Our Way. Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi, Jesse. How are you?  Jesse: Welcome to the show. Peter: I’ve been here.  So we’ve been having a lot of really rich conversations with a variety of different design leaders about their challenges. And those have been really great. But there is something larger going on out there in the world of design leadership. And I wonder if we can take some time today to try to put a name to it and kind of define the parameters of the elephant in the room here. Peter: Name it to tame it. What’s going on with leaders these days? Jesse: Yeah. So what’s going on with design leaders these days?  Peter: Oh, you know uh, the usual. What’s going on with design leaders? So many things. I found myself, in the last six months, part of a number of conversations around the state of the industry, where things are going, whether it’s on LinkedIn or these recorded conversations. A lot of them have taken as a jumping off point. Robert Fabricant’s article on the big design shakeup that he wrote for Fast Company, reflecting on what he’s seeing as some step change that’s occurring, and the struggles that design leaders are having with figuring out, like, what to hold on to, to take them to what’s next. And I think what’s going on with design leaders is there’s a recognition that what we’ve been doing for the past 20 to 25 years… Jesse: Mm-hmm. Peter: You know, I’m thinking about around the time we started Adaptive Path, maybe a little bit before then, there was an evolution,, a curve, at times gentle, at times quite bumpy, but, you could draw a line between 1997 or 8 and 2022, in terms of what was going on with design and thus design leadership. And it feels like something in the last two years has broken such that we can no longer rely on that trend just to continue to carry us forward. But it’s not clear what the new thing is to hold on to, and so design leaders are struggling with their relationship of, like, what’s next? What’s expected of me? How do I show up? Because it’s not clear for many people, not even just in design. I, think we’re seeing this… I listened to a podcast interview that Lenny Ratchitsky did with Marty Cagan. And one of my takeaways from that is that product management is in a similar vein of disruption.  Jesse: Oh, it’s just as bad on that side. Yeah, absolutely.  Peter: I think we’re in this phase shift. And we’re in this middle of it, but you can’t really be in the middle of a phase shift, right? You’re either in one state or another, but we’re no longer in the prior state. We don’t know what the next state is. And I think a lot of the tsuris, a lot of the agita, the anxiety that we’re sensing out there is because we’re in this uncomfortable middle space. The value proposition of design Jesse: Hmm. You know, as I think about trying to describe the shift that’s happened in the last few years, and I think it goes back more than the last two, but definitely in the last five years, I feel like there has been a real shift in the way that business has framed the value proposition of design. And for this generation of design leaders, they’re very attached to a particular value proposition of design that has to do with product discovery. It has to do with customer insight. It has to do with experiential exploration as a way of discovering new product opportunities in the market. The value proposition there has paid off in a very inconsistent fashion over the last 25 years. And there are now quite a lot of, because of the growth of the field, because of the hockey stick curve that we’ve been on, there are now a lot of organizations that are finding plenty of value in the market without ever engaging with any of these practices, which then has their competitors looking at it and going, why are we investing in this stuff when we’re getting incrementally better results? Peter: Yes, I think this, actually, also leads to one of those parallel conversations happening in product management, because if you read you know, Marty Cagan and you have this view of the world of product managers as, you know, empowered leaders who, given an outcome to realize, have the autonomy to figure out how to get there…right? Jesse: Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. Peter: And that’s this kind of common conception from your product management thought leaders, your Marty Cagan’s, your Perri’s, of how product management works, but then, this came up on the Lenny Ratchitsky show, there’s this recognition, most product managers, like, well into the majority, 70%, 80 percent, maybe more, are operating in what would be called a feature factory environment, where they’re not empowered, where someone else has said, this is what you’re going to build, you can figure out how you want to build it. Sure. But this is what we’re doing.  Those decisions have been made outside of that team. And, I forget who wrote it, but there was a product thought leader who was like, yeah, feature factory PMing is fine. That is right for some contexts, similar to this conversation, where mediocre-ish design is fine in some contexts, not necessarily every business will benefit from superlative design. And that’s a tough pill to swallow, I think, for a lot of leaders. Jesse:  Or at the very least the threshold of diminishing returns kicks in way sooner for some businesses… Peter: right, right, right.  Jesse: …than for others.  Peter: Erika Hall talks a lot about exchange of value, right, between the business and customers, and the source of that value exchange might not be rooted in something that user experience design has a meaningful impact beyond a very basic, like, functionality threshold. Jesse: Hmm. You know, when I think about when we started Adaptive Path and the value proposition that we were putting forward into the market, I’m reminded of the arguments that we had internally, the seven founders, about whether to call what we did design, even, because, you know, truth be told, our deliverables at that time didn’t look like design deliverables  A wireframe was an exotic, strange thing. If anybody had in-house designers, they were working in Photoshop. We at Adaptive Path literally had no one with those skills. So we were trying to define user experience as something that was little bit different from, and a little bit distinct from a traditional design discipline. Over the years, , the value proposition that emerged there was that the same practices of customer insight the same practices of experiential exploration that are a normal part of a design process could also benefit business processes as well. And that’s where the whole design thinking methodology comes from, among other things. That value proposition was a strong one during a time when there was a lot to be discovered, when there were not a lot of best practices to draw on, when nobody really knew what a lot of this stuff was going to look like, and we had to make it all up.  That’s simply not where we are anymore. And those processes and practices, that value proposition, has a lot less potency in most product categories these days because the exploration and the discovery has been done. The best practices are there. There’s no need to reimagine the shopping cart. We’ve had 25 years 30 years of shopping carts. Peter: Yeah. So let me start with where you are and then I want to pull it broader. We’ve had 30 years of shopping carts. That is not an interesting problem to solve. Much like onboarding a new customer is not an interesting problem to solve. They fill out their name and password. They put in some information, they give you some money, whatever. But, we still treat onboarding flows as if they’re some source of innovation or some opportunity for innovation. And one of the things that you’re touching on that I think reflects the discombobulation that we’re feeling in design is, especially for those of us who’ve been doing it for 20-some years, is we haven’t taken into account that we came in where all of it was interesting. We published a report in 2002 on how to design a registration flow right? Because like, it was an interesting problem to solve, but we also recognized, like, 20 years ago, like, let’s just solve it once and everybody just use this thing. At this point, that stuff is basically done.  Commodification of UI design Peter: And I think what design leaders have trouble recognizing is just how much of, I’m going to say this intentionally, UI design is commodified, is not strategic, is not interesting anymore. Much like… I tend to draw an analogy to residential architecture. Plumbing is commodified. Electrician work is commodified. Your basic contracting is, roofing is commodified. It’s not that it’s not important, but there’s a way to do it. You do it the same way. There’s standards and practices and codes. Just follow it and done.  We still want to treat it like it’s a source of inspiration and new thinking. And so learning to let go of that, I think, has been a challenge for design leaders. There’s an opportunity that we as a community are missing of building a workforce of UI designers, highly trained UI designers who can design to code, who could come out of programs, like, in a community college.  You know, you should be able to get an associate’s degree in software UI design. Instead what we’re doing is we’re asking people with 10 to 15 years experience to design onboarding flows. ‘Cause that’s, who we have around. We’re not staffed appropriately.  Let me finish with one last thought though, which is reflecting on one of the conversations we had, which was with Rebecca Nordstroem from LEGO.  She was this first UX designer on this manufacturing and supply chain team. And they realized, oh yeah, we’ve got some software, so we should have a UX designer on it. So she showed up and she did some UX design. And then she asked, what are your other problems? And they said what their other problems were. And she’s like, I think I can help with those too. And they weren’t UX screen based design problems, right? They were more systemic, more procedural challenges throughout supply chain and manufacturing that she realized, Oh, I can apply my UX design abilities to all kinds of problems that would not be considered standard UX challenges. And what I like about that is she didn’t define herself by her medium. She defined herself by… I am a capable problem solver with a set of tools, sic me at your problems and I can help you resolve those. And I think that shift is one that a lot of design leaders have not made. They’re too rooted in the media and material of their practice and not in the opportunity of their practice. Jesse: I can see that. I can see that. I can also see those opportunities being pretty tightly constrained by the environments that they’re in, and the mandates that they’re given, and the way that their roles are framed.  You know, a lot of the fear and anxiety that I’m hearing out there comes from the fact that these design leadership roles, which used to be positioned as pretty highly strategic roles, influencing product strategy, product direction, product roadmaps, that kind of thing, are now being recast and reframed as operational delivery style management roles. The disjunction Jesse: And there’s this significant disjunction for people with what they thought their value proposition was, what they thought they could offer. And they haven’t been able to get the traction that Rebecca was able to get in demonstrating value in small ways that opens up those larger opportunities because nobody’s even giving them the small opportunities because they’re like, you’re our pixel factory; why do you care about all this other stuff? Peter: I imagine … this didn’t come up, that Rebecca might’ve been met with some of that resistance. I suspect… This speaks to how you and I interface with different audiences in our practices, because what you’re saying in terms of the strategic alignment of the senior most designers getting taken away and, retrenchment to production, I am not seeing that with the audiences that I’m working with.  There is still a desire. I’m working with companies hiring sometimes their first design executive because they want a design leader in those discussions. Jesse: I’m not disputing that aspect of it. I’m definitely seeing that part too.  Peter: I guess then it’s lumpy.  Jesse: Yeah, it is lumpy. It absolutely is. It continues to be the best of times and the worst of times. Peter: A concept I’ve been recommunicating a lot over the past year is the Leadership Ceiling. Our conversation with Tim Kieschnick a few years ago now. And, there are folks who are hitting a ceiling that they can’t move above.  But what the Rebecca story said to me is that I think too often designers make their own ceilings. They are so wedded to a particular space and way of working that when even given those opportunities they don’t engage them. They think that’s not what they do. Designers getting in their own way Peter: They don’t recognize it as an opportunity. I am generally far more critical, and have been for 25 years, of designers being the primary constraint on their own ability to have an impact, than anyone else in the organization.  Because what I see elsewhere in the organization is people looking for someone with answers. People are looking for someone to show up with confidence, and if you can show up with confidence, you can make more change than you think you can. And I think designers lack that confidence often in new contexts. Jesse: That’s interesting because you’re suggesting that there is a cultural thread within design itself that holds it back. What you identified as this kind of reflexive passivity, this learned helplessness on the part of designers, or on the part of design leaders, such that they can’t see themselves as being bigger than what they’ve always been. Peter: Something you and I discussed a few days ago… In order to evolve, the need for ego death, right? They need to recognize that who they have been for 10 to 20 years is not serving who they could be and the impact they could have, and they might have to let go of what they thought were core aspects of their identity, say in craft, in some particular part of the practice, and be, you know what, I don’t define myself by my ability to model difficult interactive systems well, because that only was going to get me so far. I am needing to let go of that part of my identity and embrace a new identity in whatever that opportunity is that’s in front of you, whether as a leader or solving new kinds of problems. And, I mean, ego death is hard. That’s why it’s called death. If it was trivial, we would just be like putting on a new hat and be like, Hey, I’m a new person now. These identity shifts are challenging. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. And certainly, if you have spent your career mastering a craft and advancing in your career by proving your value by demonstrating your mastery of that craft, it can be very, very difficult to let go of that mastery as being the source of your value. I think that for a lot of these design leaders, there is kind of a choice that you have to make, as to whether you’re going to take a more kind of operational stance where you are going to be someone who is going to build a really awesome design production delivery engine for an organization, or are you going to be a leader who’s going to take a more strategic stance and try to be the kind of design leader who is going to try to drive product strategy and try to drive product roadmapping through the work that you and your team are doing. Peter: I don’t have much to say, but, but yes.  Yeah, I mean, it’s… both designers and researchers feel entitled to work in certain contexts. And when they are let go, when people say we don’t need that practice anymore, it’s this grave injustice to this whole field that you let go of that team. And my thought is like, no one’s entitled to a job ever, anywhere. And how did we get to this point of entitlement, this entitlement of “How I want to do it,” right?  Jesse: Yeah, the orthodoxy.  Democratization Peter: Yeah. This is this whole democratization of user research controversy, which I don’t think is controversial, but a lot of people do. It’s like, well, no. We should have trained UX researchers doing research. If we let other people do research, they’ll do it wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m like, okay, but, No. Like, like, that’s clearly not what others are feeling, and upon what rock are you standing, claiming that anyone building software must have a PhD trained UX researcher, or they’re doing it wrong?  Clearly they don’t care. And so there’s a lack of self awareness around the nature of what people have to offer, the value they’re bringing into these contexts, and that was enabled or protected by, you know, a decade of really good times. And then when that tide rolled out, they were left exposed. Jesse:  Hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s true. I think that’s true. The thing is, that these organizations that are not adhering to the orthodoxy, they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re not suffering in the market in any way for not having an army of PhDs and formalized processes and all this stuff. It would be a really different story if we could all see that there was a lot of value being left on the table, but it’s simply an unproven hypothesis. And at this point, 25 years in, you got to wonder how much more time you give it to be proven out. Design as a choice Peter: That’s probably true about anything. Any function in a firm is a strategic choice. I was just having a conversation with another design leader who was talking about how she communicates to her team why a company is making certain decisions. ‘Cause sometimes, the team gets frustrated that design is not allowed to kind of practice to their fullness. And she uses this analogy of airlines. There’s some airlines like Emirates who spend a lot of money on designers and the experience, because that’s the value proposition. And so if you’re working in a place like Emirates, you’re going to get to do good design on behalf of the people there. And that is their strategy. And then there are companies like EasyJet and Ryanair, located in Europe, who… their value proposition is cheap. Full stop. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That is a perfectly legitimate… hundreds of thousands of people choose EasyJet and Ryanair recognizing that they’re going to have a worse user experience in exchange for affordability. And so I think we’ve lost sight of that variability. It’s not that it’s… that user experience is proving to be not valuable enough across the board that every company is going to sacrifice it. But everybody was like, oh, we need to have a UX team because they all have UX teams and five to 10 years later, they’re like, what is the value of that team for us? Now in some organizations, lots of value.  Jesse: Mm hmm. Peter: I have one client, a single company that has multiple product lines and some product lines are worth investing in design and building out big design teams and in the same company, another product line is laying off half their designers because it’s not materially important to that part of the business, so. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s the appropriate way to think about it. There are going to be a lot of different flavors of design teams according to the product, the category, the market, where that product is in its life cycle.  You know, you can’t hit the ground running with a feature factory. There’s too much, there’s too much still unknown. You have to build your way up to that. So there are practices that apply differently. There are styles of leadership that apply differently at different points on an organization’s journey. So it’s extremely lumpy out there and honestly, probably just going to get lumpier. Peter: And kind of a related, I think, trend line, starting in 2008 or 2009 with the financial crisis and the time of zero percent interest rates. And I think a lot of companies were willing to try things like invest in scaled design programs because it didn’t cost them much of anything anyways because money was generally free, and now that a lot of companies are having to practice mindfulness with their balance sheets, if they hadn’t realized the value of design in the last 15 years, yeah, they’re going to scale it back. Others, others are like, no, this has worked. So, the state of things in UX in 2024 is way better, just generally, than it was in 2008. I mean, just in terms of the number of people doing it, however crappy so many experiences are. Like the fact that any credible business that I engage with, has a mobile app, it has something I can use on my phone to get my business done. That kind of thing, even on the web, was not true 15 years ago right? So there’s been a general improvement… Jesse: absolutely.  Peter: …that I think gets lost in the pain of today. Jesse: Yeah. The baseline for user experience in the world continues to rise. There’s no question about that.  Peter: I think there is some question. There’s a lot of angry middle aged white people on LinkedIn who think we’re going backwards. Jesse: I think the question is whether the practice of user experience design has continued to elevate along with the experiences that we’ve delivered. We’re raising the baseline on the quality of the experiences that we’re delivering, but user experience design was aiming for the ceiling… Peter: hmm. Jesse: …not the baseline. Peter: Yeah, yeah. There’s kind of a money-ballishness to this, right? Like there’s an optimizing of just how much UX do you need for what gain?  Something that I realized a few years ago as I turned on my television, and it was evident that the Prime Video logo on my screen was a rasterized image. And I was like, that is a demonstration of a lack of care in design on Amazon’s part, right? And then I was thinking like, you know what? That’s kind of true of Amazon. Amazon, because they are a moneyball organization, right? Lots of data that drives decision making. They have figured out just how much to invest in design and no more, to realize some, whatever that optimal result is. And if they, I mean, you mentioned diminishing returns. If they were to invest another a hundred dollars in design, they’d only get 1 back after that point. And so they stop, and they just stop at mediocrity. ‘Cause that’s what works for them and their business with their market. And that’s a perfectly rational decision.  Jesse: Yeah.  You can call it mediocrity if you want. I would say that you know, another term for that is good enough. And that’s the thing that designers tend to lack, is a sense of what is good enough. They’re always trying to close the gap with the perfect, with the ideal. All they can see are the ways in which the thing is falling short. SNL’s “Papyrus” Jesse: So this past weekend, Ryan Gosling hosted Saturday Night Live. A number of years ago he was on that show doing a sketch called Papyrus, which is about the typeface Papyrus and its use in the film Avatar. They came back to that character in that premise for a follow up sketch this past weekend. And designers are all like, ha ha ha, I feel so seen. And I’m not sure you should feel seen by this sketch because this is about somebody who is obsessed with something that doesn’t matter. The choice of typeface in Avatar has made no material difference to the billions of dollars that the franchise has made. None. The extra dollar that they would have spent to choose a different typeface would have had no material impact on the project. So now the question is, what are you so obsessed with here? What is the ideal that you’re actually upholding? Peter: Right. And there is a… Jesse: And is it any wonder you’re getting yourself shut out of strategic conversations by advocating for this stuff? Peter: Because you’re foaming at the mouth talking about typefaces.  Yeah, yeah.  Or  Jesse: whatever your version of that is.  Peter: I literally just watched that sketch last night, ’cause I’d heard so much about it. And I don’t have much more to say besides yeah. Like, yes, you feel seen because it feels like the writers are in on the joke with you, that, you know, this billion dollar movie couldn’t be bothered to spend any effort on their typefaces, but then the punchline of the second sketch is, like, the jokes on you, that shit doesn’t matter, right? And, this wild -eyed advocate realizing he needs to move on with his life, that he was the source of his own pain.  Yeah. And I think that’s true of a lot of designers. And I think that speaks to, that’s a little bit of the identity and ego death, especially if you went to a design school, this thing that I was taught 15, 20 years ago as the most important thing. This thing that you have placed so much of your sense of self worth in, hitting the shoals of ignorance and neglect on the part of the organization around you. Understandable ignorance and neglect on the part of the organization around you.  And you’re like, but my value system and, unable to move past that, looking at some of the comments to things I read on LinkedIn, I’m seeing designers who are retrenching, who are like, no, craft is even more important, like, everybody-else-is-wrong-but-me kinds of mindset, which ends up making them appear like the crazy man in the Papyrus video, *Your* value proposition Jesse: Well, and it’s such an interesting thing, too, just the label design and designer, and ways that people get attached to that. Because you know, in my coaching work with my clients, part of what I often do is I help them articulate for themselves, in order to articulate to others, what their value proposition is as a leader, distinct from the value proposition of their team or the value proposition of design as a function.  What do they bring as a leader to the room, to any given conversation? And as we start to unpack the mindset that they bring, and the values that they bring, and the perspective and the philosophy that they bring, often we get to a point where we take a step back and I look at it and I go ,”This doesn’t actually look like a designer. This is about connecting customer insight with product opportunities.” Or this is about being able to envision things in holistic fashion. This is about being able to make strategic trade-offs. This is about a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the way that anybody else construes the role of design.  But because you’re so attached to that label for it, you’re pigeonholing yourself, potentially, into a corner of the organization where you can’t be effective, where you can’t do the things that you came here to do. So this is why I’m having this conversation with a lot of design leaders these days about like, if you want to do the job as you see the job, if you want to deliver value the way you see yourself delivering value, you probably should be looking at some product job descriptions. Peter: Well, I was going to ask, ’cause now you’re helping people recognize their own complicity in their own ego death. Jesse: Yes. Peter: Right, as they’ve been the ones define the distinct value that they can bring. And the sum total of that isn’t rooted in their practitioner past. What do you see in terms of how folks respond to this? How do they take this in? And what do they do about it? Jesse: It’s a process. It’s not something that we do in an hour. You know, I work with my clients for months at a time, peeling the onion. And sometimes there is a really strong emotional, kind of, coming to terms. A lot of it has to do with your history and how you got into the field and what that got you out of sometimes. For some people design was the thing that was going to allow them to use their creativity in the world for good. And reconciling themselves to the way that that’s worked out is itself a process that they have to go through before they can embrace a new identity. Creativity Peter: So many thoughts. Well, no, when you said the word creativity, that was a trigger because a week or so ago, I wrote a thing on LinkedIn around professional associations and how we don’t have a credible association for the digital product design thing that we do. We have many, but none that are really advocating for people who do this work in a way that feels meaningful given the problems that we’re talking about, this confusion that our industry is in.  But the creativity thing, someone I just saw today, was arguing against what I was putting forth in terms of professional association, because they said “no one is going to legislate my creativity or my ability to be creative in however I choose to be.” Like, it was exactly kind of the issue that we’re seeing, whereas this middle aged white dude’s definition of creativity and his need to be free to be creative as he sees fit is exactly how he is constraining his ability, ultimately, to have a real impact within the context that he likely wants to have an impact in. Those things are directly related, and many, if not most, people don’t recognize that.  Peter: We talk so much, so fucking much about outputs, sorry, outcomes over outputs, right? That is a mantra that we in product design, we use a lot. Won’t shut up about. But when we say, in order to deliver outcomes, it’s not about you as identifying with your practice and craft, but you navigating this organization to, to make positive change, all of a sudden, a bunch of people are like, actually, maybe it is just about output. I just want to output pretty comps and shiny files. ‘Cause that’s, that’s what I like to do. And if that doesn’t drive the outcomes, maybe I’m okay with that.  Jesse: Yeah. So you referred to the fact that we don’t have an organization that really everybody looks to, to advocate for us and there is this essential centerlessness to the community, to the field, to the practice but then when it comes to advocacy, what I wonder is advocacy with whom, you know, there’s no Congress to lobby, no producer’s guild to negotiate with. Peter: There are aspects of the work we do that are already have been lobbied for, primarily around matters of accessibility. It is a demonstration of this gap that we in the user experience community weren’t the ones to get Congress excited about deceptive patterns. That’s a failing on us. That’s a failing on us that we, we’re not able to articulate the problems with this thing that is core to our practice, user interface design, and how it can be used to negatively impact people, to trick people into engaging in things that they do not think that they are doing. We didn’t have any representative function that could have found the right congressperson, got some laws, got the conversation started, got laws passed. That is something that is a kind of advocacy. You’re, you’re making a face. What’s the face? Jesse: Oh, I just, you know, again, this kind of assumes that there is a mainstream of thinking in this community. And I’m not sure that there is, you know, I think there is no Us here. There are scattered pockets of different practices and different philosophies and different mindsets. And I think that what you and I perceive to be the center of the mainstream is actually just the opinions of the people that we are closest to and talk to the most. Peter: Perhaps if there is no center, if there is no mainstream, there will be no advancement. There will be subgroups sniping at each other till time immemorial. and we’re just going to continue to squabble towards irrelevancy.  Jesse: Digital product design generally, I think some part of it will always be a vernacular form.  The UI Design Ecosystem Peter: Maybe I’m out on a limb here, but something I’ve been thinking about is, there’s a set of interlocking components here, where it actually starts with, we need more basic skilled designers because we have too many people with senior and lead level skills doing basic level work. If we need more basic level designers, we need a way to develop that practice, that base. That’s where I think about things like how do we turn UI design into a community college, something you get in two years, but a degree of rigor. But that degree of rigor means that there’s testing and standards that these folks are being measured against, such that when they get their degree in UI design, they are seen as worth putting into a practice with a baseline of understanding around human behavior, information processing, all those types of things. And then you need a set of codes that can enforce those practices, right? So there’s many parts here, but again, it’s not unique. And in fact, it’s not unique to UI design. Many other practices have this ecosystem of operation. And I believe that UI design is too important to not take this on in some similar way. Jesse: I admire the vision and I agree that such a thing in place would raise the baseline for our practices and for some of our outcomes. I still don’t think that that’s going to be the guard against malpractice on the part of designers that a lot of people see it as being. Peter: I mean, something else that is inferred by what I was saying before would be a requirement of some form of professionalizing, whether it’s certification, licensure, et cetera. If you are in some form professionalized, you have protection now to push back. To pull it back to, I think, the core of our conversation, the value of this is legitimacy. I think one of the issues designers face inside these organizations is it’s easy to be perceived as illegitimate because literally anyone can call themselves a designer. Five different designers have five very different sets of skills, levels of skills, et cetera. There’s not a mechanism within these organizations to often, to appropriately judge that. You hire designers that might work out and it might not. There’s no bar that any of them had to exceed in order to be considered a designer. And if you were a clueless hiring manager, because you’re an engineer or product person or a business person, a startup founder or whatever, you’re just like, I don’t know, I like the look of the thing that you had on your portfolio. I’d like you to do that for me. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: People get burned. I mean, I do hear this story. I know folks, design leaders have told me about how their boss will never let them hire UX researchers because in some prior job, that boss had bad experiences with UX researchers, ’cause those UX researchers did it badly. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: Not because there’s something wrong with UX research, but because they were exposed to something called UX research that was evidently crappy, did not add value. And so this person is now categorically like, why would I invest in that anymore? If that’s what UX research is. Jesse: Well, again, it’s about delivery against a value proposition and making sure that that value proposition is clearly communicated and understood. That leader with the previous UX research team was, you know, sold something that they couldn’t deliver. And so tuning your value prop to something you can actually deliver and that is actually valuable to the business I think is the trick.  And yeah, it’s true. A lot of these business leaders have seen a lot of design teams waste a lot of time. Endlessly, you know, fleshing out models of customer behavior that aren’t leading to material changes in the design. It’s like, why are we doing another round of investigation here? What, what…  Peter: More journey maps! Jesse: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so again, the diminishing returns really kick in there and it starts to be a case of stick to the stuff where you know you’re getting value from your design team and, and double down on that. And that, again, comes back to production and delivery.  If we can’t have a professional association, what do you see as the way forward, do you think? Ways forward Peter: I surmised there are multiple ways forward. One that we’re starting to see is designers who are not wedded to the practice and the craft, willing to let go of design and embrace adjacent practices like product management. And I would love to see that. The more we have design-informed product managers, the even better, everything is going to be, right?  I had this conversation with someone a couple of weeks ago at one of my client organizations, kind of manager-level design leader who’d been offered, the way I understood it, basically offered a product job. And he was hesitant to take it because he’s like, but, but my, my home, my people, my tribe, my thing, the thing I love, et cetera, and I’m like, I’m just like, go do that. You’re going to do more for your team in that role, in the product role than you are able to do in your design leader role in terms of their ability to have impact and influence and bring that customer-centricity to the product development. And so that’s one thread is, embracing other roles in the organization that enable you to have the kind of impact you want, even if you’re not oriented on practice. So that’s an initial thought. AI something something Peter: There’s something, something AI, something, I don’t know. I’m still figuring that one out. If I’m hopeful about AI, it’s AI does the scut work so that the people doing design get to do the higher level, more strategic thinking, systems oriented, complex work. You’ve looked into it. You’ve, you’ve been pursuing AI ish stuff in design for a couple of years. What do you see as a credible trend going forward? Jesse: There are a couple of different facets to it. There are people who are folding AI features into existing products. There are people who are building brand new products, incorporating AI features, and then there’s the use of AI in the design process itself. This last area is extremely immature. It’s been very difficult to get reliable results in terms of getting an LLM to provide anything resembling design guidance with any kind of consistency. So it’s still early days for all of that stuff. I don’t see AI taking away design jobs anytime soon, if only because the processes will have to adapt to accommodate the technology. And right now I’m not seeing that happening. Peter: You’re not seeing processes yet adapting just because everything is so new?  Jesse: I don’t see anybody changing their processes to integrate new tooling. Not from what I’m hearing. I’m sure that it’s out there, but no tool has yet been good enough to inspire somebody to revise how they do user experience design. Put it that way.  Peter: One of the fears is that a tool is good enough that means we can just fire 50 designers because the tool does some aspect of the design work, and we don’t need, in the same way that, you know, an LLM can write my five page term paper now and get C minus, but maybe a C minus is good enough. Jesse: So again, I’ll refer back to how you construe the value proposition of design. If the value proposition of design is you know, ship screens faster, AI is going to be a really important part of how you achieve what you want to achieve as a design leader. If the value proposition of design for you is more around customer insight and driving product strategy There are different opportunities there, and the human element, I think, plays a much stronger role in that aspect of it.  Peter: Multiple times you’ve returned to this concept of value proposition. And I’m guessing that’s something you’ve arrived at after some period of work, practice, reflection, whatever. I’m wondering what you see in terms of that resonance of this concept of, designers and design leaders, articulating a value prop, doing the work to identify their value prop, why has that seemingly become so central to your thinking around this? Jesse: It is frequently the pinch point. It is frequently the place where the design leader is disconnected from the rest of the organization in some way. It has to do with how aligned they are with their leadership and with their partners about the value that they’re there to provide. And it’s important for leaders not to make too many assumptions, stepping into a new role about what people think you’re there to do. And I, you know, I work with a lot of leaders who just haven’t asked enough questions of the executives, of their partners, about the role of design in the process, and what they see as the value of design in product development, where they see design participating. And so first we have to unpack the design leader’s own model of these things, and then do the gap analysis against what they’re hearing back from the organization, and then figure out how to reconcile that. Peter: When a design leader has articulated a value proposition, is this something that you encourage them then to be explicit about within their work, and to share that with their leadership and their peers? Jesse: It depends on the situation. It depends on how bad the disconnect is. Sometimes, yeah, it is about a propaganda campaign. Sometimes it’s more subtle and thematic. Peter: Are you familiar… something that came up in one of my leadership training classes is a user manual of yourself, right? Atlassian has advocated for this process. Is that a, and so this would fit into that..  Jesse: Yes.  Peter: Are you an advocate for that kind of thing?  Jesse: Yes.  I am actively working with clients on their user manuals. Yes. Peter: The impression I got is that, at least through your work with design leaders, these design leaders feel that whatever their value and value proposition is, has a perhaps greater delta, or there’s a bigger gap, between that and what the leadership, business leadership, et cetera, values or expects from them in design. But I’m wondering if you have any insight into, is that specific about design or does every function feel that their value or values have a gap, or are there certain functions that are feeling more disconnected to the overarching value system than others? And again, you might only know this from a design lens, but does there seem to be something specific about designer unique to design in this framing? Jesse: I wouldn’t say it’s unique to design. It is, I think in part, an artifact of design’s age as a function in these organizations. It just simply hasn’t been around as long. I think also design’s value proposition has been a moving target. As we’ve been talking about for the last 25 years. And so there is some need to clarify, to elicit some shared understanding, you know every one of those executives is coming into the room with either some past experience working with design or not. In either case, you’ve got to reconcile those different views of it in order to align on a value prop. Peter: And that’s something I stress with all the design leaders that I work with. I’ve been doing a bunch of work with Chase Bank over the last two and a half years. It’s a quickly growing team from 350 to over 900 people in just the one team that I’m supporting. So even within this team, there’s a lot of newness, people with a lot of different backgrounds. Some people with financial services backgrounds, some people with tech backgrounds, a lot of people with agency backgrounds who, even within the user experience organization, there’s a lot of different points of view as to what their job is given their backgrounds and then they’re interfacing in turn with product leaders, some who’ve been at the bank for 20 years and have a, probably, a very legacy and outmoded view of design. But then other product leaders they’ve brought in who are new, who they, in fact, these designers might be more aligned with the new product leader than that product leader is with their peers who’ve been at the bank longer and just navigating all this…  Jesse: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, this is the thing that I’ve seen more than once with new leaders coming into an organization, where they’re hired into an organization they felt a really strong alignment with the manager who hired them and they get in and they find out that that manager has no alignment with the level above them and they can’t get anything done. Surprise! Leadership ceiling  Peter: Weren’t we going to try to finish this on a high note?  Jesse: Yeah? Oh, dammit. Peter: Um, I don’t know, I think the highest note for me and it’s, one of my few drums to beat, is that I think design and design leaders will succeed most when they get over themselves and focus on the problems and focus on the impact and less on the process and things like quote craft.  And it’s kind of that simple. And I think the more we do that, the more we will realize greater influence and the more it will actually benefit the practice of design, right? ‘Cause this is, as I’m saying this, this is something I think about with respect to working with design executives, design executives who’ve come up through the practice often want to stay rooted in the practice. And what they don’t know is, by staying rooted in the team, that they are actually doing those people a disservice, because in their role, they have special access granted to the people with real power and authority in the organization. And the best thing they can do for their team is to ignore their team. And spend a lot of time with the senior leadership who have access to money and resources and strategic direction, spend that time up there. And then through that work, it will benefit that design org because of your ability to help shape or move those questions.  But if you’re just managing down and ignoring all the leadership stuff, yeah, your team is going to stultify. Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Design needs allies, period. Design needs allies to succeed. The design leader has to be in the role of cultivating those allies. And honestly, if you’re feeling stuck as a design leader, maybe it’s time to go become one of those allies. Peter: I like that. That’s a good place to stop. Jesse: Thank you so much, Peter. This has been great. Peter: This has been fun. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.  Peter: I’m like, how are people going to make sense of what the hell we just spoke about? But I…  Jesse: That’ll be, that’ll be part of the fun.  I trust our audience. They can keep up.

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: On today’s show, in a conversation recorded in November 2023, Christina Goldschmidt reflects on her first 60 days on the job as the newly appointed VP of product design for the music industry giant Warner Music Group. She offers thoughts on getting up to speed and finding early success as an incoming leader, profiling your stakeholders as if they were users, the leadership power of personal vulnerability. Peter: Christina. Thank you so much for joining us. Christina: Thanks so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here. Peter: As, usual for us want to start out just by getting a better sense of who you are and what you’re up to. I know you’re in a new role, so if you could just share kind of your professional affiliation and, what are you doing now? Christina: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. So I have been in the field of digital design for over 25 years and that’s been many twists and turns. And I just started a new role as the VP of Product Design at Warner Music Group. And I’m just a few days shy of hitting my 60 day mark And so it’s a very, very interesting time to have a chat about that. And my role there is that I lead product design, which is both user experience design and visual design, but also working to build out our user research practice. Also, our brand new content design team, design operations, and making sure that we are just a fully functioning working product design team. Also adding things like design systems, things like that. Starting a new role Peter: It sounds like you’re introducing a lot of. new elements into the organization. Was that something that they knew they needed and were looking for the leader to bring it? Or was that part of a conversation you were having with them as they were talking to you? Like, oh, this is, this is what I would want to do if you were to bring me in. How did that conversation go? Christina: Yeah. So one of the things that’s really interesting is that my entire hiring cycle was three weeks and I’ve never actually had a job, I think that was that quick, except for maybe 25 years ago. And so that was a real testament to them knowing a lot of what they wanted in a leader, but also trusting in me to be able to come in and diagnose everything that needed to happen. And so we would have conversations along the way of maybe we need this, maybe we need that. So, halfway through the conversation saying, Oh, you know, we don’t have content here, so think about that. You know, that would be the kind of aspect of the conversation, but larger things like design systems the larger structure of how to build out research, adding design operations, those are things that they’re trusting me to really bring, diagnose and decide how to structure. Peter: What group are you in? Are you reporting up to a product leader or are you in a different kind of organization? Christina: Yeah. So, because Warner Music Group is a music company, I report to the president of technology. And so it’s very different than, say, my last job at Etsy, where we were a technology company and I used to report to the chief product officer. I’m still one away from the CEO, but I am in this interesting new space where our entire organization is the technology organization. So now my immediate peers are engineering, product management, and something called product solutions, which is really our liaisons with the various labels and business, business partners. Jesse: So you described this three-week sprint of a hiring cycle and, that just feels like this whirlwind where you have absolutely no time to prepare, no time to even really get your head around how you want to show up, who you want to be, who you need to engage with, how you want to engage. It feels like you had to hit the ground running and make it up as you went along. How did you start figuring out how to engage this brand new organization? A very different kind of a problem, different kind of context than you were used to. Christina: Well, I think that hiring process was sort of a, in a sense, a preview of what the job might be in the first year. Jesse: In a good way, I hope. Christina: In all honesty, right? Like, it’s a two-way street every single time you’re in a hiring process. And the concept is, is that it’s a startup within an enterprise company. And so being able to actually intelligently show up in a super fast hiring process, diagnose what they need so that I can show myself in my best light to them, shows that I can have basically a bunch of things thrown at me every single day and be able to diagnose that and move it forward. It’s not for everyone, we’ll just say that, right? This was not a role that was for everyone. Yeah. Peter: You know, one thing I’ve noticed, just following you on LinkedIn, is, and you mentioned it earlier, expanding the organization. Something else I also know about you is that you went and got an MBA at one point, so you know how to do math in spreadsheet form. Christina: Yes, Yes, I do. Peter: I’m sure your PowerPoint game is on point. But I’m wondering, what, if any, business case did you have to make around expanding your team? Was that something they had done the work to realize there’s some broader expansion and, we’ve already assumed it, or were you needing to argue for, may not be the right language, but help them understand the potential and opportunity and, thus do business casing. Like, how did you free up the resources for headcount? Christina: When you’re undertaking something like this, that’s the first thing you ask. Especially in such a short cycle you want to understand how open they are to design, how much they value it, what they think the role of design will be and therefore my role. I was actually very happy and pleased to hear right out of the bat that they were already planning and had already started to put budgets in, that were very appropriate for things that I would want to need. And so I did not have to actually make the business case. When I got in the door, there was definitely finagling, horse trading, and things like that. I will say that immediately from day one, I had to prove value, and have to make sure that I’m not going to lose those heads, right? But at least they understood and they value design and they see how important it is to build a really great product arm and that they had actually already allocated significant amount of head count to design. And that they left it up to me as to how to carve out that headcount. Jesse: I think one of the biggest challenges for leaders who are new to an organization, trying to figure out how to deliver some kind of short term value, is the fact that they just don’t know anything yet. They don’t know anything about the context. They don’t know anything about what people really care about. They don’t know what their priorities ought to be, really, in terms of value delivery. And so I wonder, how did you go about learning the landscape in order to figure out where you could start delivering value right away? Christina: Hmm. Yeah, so let’s be clear I don’t know anything. But I know just enough to be a little bit dangerous, right? One of the things that’s interesting about Warner is that their fiscal year starts in October. Planning was basically close to being done when I was walking in the door. And so, that was a really important time for me to understand where things were really important. By knowing what their major focus areas were, and getting involved to help them make a better PowerPoint, to present that to the executive leadership team to the CEO so that we could convey that story, I was able to then say, Okay, I now understand this because I’ve helped to better visualize it and help us tell that story better Jesse: Hmm. Christina: And then understanding what that is, talking more deeply of… what does this mean, and having basically weekly prioritization conversations every week to say, I could choose to do 1000 things this week. Which do we think are the top three, five that matter this week? And that kind of triage is really important. Jesse: Who are you having those conversations with. Whose opinions really matter here? Christina: Yeah, so it happens with my boss, the president of technology, and you know, I’m four in a box, right, with my other three peers. And it, oddly, is not happening all together. I’m having them as sort of more one-off conversations than triangulating it myself. But it actually is pretty consistent. They’re just nuances that come with it when you have it as individual conversations. And I actually think in our environment, it’s working very well because it allows me to be that filter as opposed to us trying to work very hard to get in a consensus mode, which, If I was trying to facilitate that, it would take us much longer than if I’m taking in quick information and then choosing it for myself. Jesse: Hmm. Peter: The speed with which they moved suggested they had a, and I think you said this, like a pretty decent idea of what it was they wanted. And I’m wondering, what was it about you that landed? What were those qualities or characteristics, and then perhaps related, how clear was your mandate upon arrival? Or is that something you’re having to tell them? Sometimes we hear from leaders who, their first three months is to figure out what their mandate should be. And other times, when they come in, there’s a pretty clear idea of what’s expected of them. Christina: Yeah. I can only report what they’ve parroted back to me, right? So there could be other things that I don’t know about why and how they chose me. But the question that they asked me for my case study was to present to the most complex project I’ve ever worked on. And they also were like, and it doesn’t matter if it’s like song and dance beautiful, just show up with some work. That was their instructions. That’s a very different sort of prep sheet than other jobs that I’ve seen and things like that. And I think that that really shows to me sort of how they think and what they value. Telling a transformation story Christina: And what I gathered was a massive transformation story that I had done previously in the insurance space, where I had taken extremely legacy systems, you know, things that are on green screens, things that look like they’re Windows 98, variety of legacy old systems where there are three different systems, systems that had stories about people needing over a year to get trained on how to use them, systems like that, and showing them how relatively quickly was able to diagnose, was able to prove that the system that my team was working on was actually going to be better without having A/B testing or statistical results. That I could actually leverage both quant and qual in a much smaller in-house pool as opposed to, what I might do at Etsy, which is A/B test very quickly at scale and be able to prove that with metrics and be able to make something that is simple, usable, beautiful out of something that was previously none of those things, you know, cause I think I have that idea that because we all have really stunning cell phones in our pockets now, right? These mobile devices, that no matter how deep into enterprise software or workhorse software that you’re in, everyone has a mental model of really beautiful, simple, elegant interface design now. And so there’s no reason for any tool to not take the, like, deep, really thoughtful customer experience into mind there. I think that philosophy also really was exciting for them, too, that I also had had experience bringing that kind of consumer facing interface design and simplified user experience to actually enterprise-based software and it was for, actually, business improvement, right? Things like reducing training, improving time on task, that is also always about making the experience better, making tangible metrics better, being able to prove that value. I think that that was a big part of that story for me. And that I was able to show them that case study that they were like, Oh, this is exactly our problem here. You get it and you’ve done it. After, you know, one 30-minute conversation with the hiring leader and one, 30-minute conversation with the in-house recruiter. So being able to pull that out, I think made it look like a good fit. And then the other thing that I think was helpful was that they were signaling that this is a hands-on role and you know, my last job was very much at scale. Very much where I was primarily doing operations and improving the way my team worked. Yes, I would have regular weekly reviews. Yes, I would think about the holistic customer experience, but my job was not day to day in our products and making them better and leading designers day to day. I had an entire, you know, hierarchy of managers and directors underneath me who I deeply trusted in order to do that on a day to day basis. Here we’re a much smaller organization, where my ability to still give day to day design decisions is actually important. My ability to still be able to do that and to show that I could still do that, learn and talk about the work and not be just at a pure operations level, I think was also helpful. And, to understand, I think, part of the larger value proposition to go to your second question They didn’t fully articulate this to me, but I could see it immediately when I walked in the door, is that you know, there are three major, like, music companies out there, right? And we’re one of those, and it’s a great time in the music industry where there’s all this growth and really learning how to leverage streaming to make the business better. It’s a time for great innovation. But not all of the experiences are really, truly human centric and don’t actually meet the mental models of the users or the customers that use them. And so to be able to actually bring innovation, to bring the tools of the trade of helping the team use more modern design techniques, really upping their game, so that we can look at design as a center of innovation, so that we are more competitive, that we can produce software that will gain us more business, that kind of aspect is definitely an aspect of my job. That it will be a competitive differentiator that the experiences that we make and the software that we ship will actually help us improve our business. What does it mean to be ‘hands-on’? Jesse: So you raised the question in here of how close you actually get to the work as part of your role. And for a lot of the people that I talk to, stepping from a highly leveraged operational oversight kind of a role into a role where you are closer to the design work, you’re kind of sleeves rolled up in it, for a lot of people that raises this fear that they’re not actually progressing as leaders, that this represents some sort of backsliding toward craft and away from leverage. And so I wonder what it was like for you to step back into craft and how that has affected how you see yourself as a leader. Christina: I think one of the things that design leaders have is craft and that it’s our, not to reuse this term again, but it is our competitive differentiation as a field. Jesse: Mm. Christina: That there’s lots of overlap with the people that we work with every day, right? There’s this Venn diagram of, oh, we can set strategy together. Oh, we can determine technical feasibility together. But the craft is the thing that we do and that we own. And so as a leader, when I had an organization at scale, I never actually hired managers who did not come from craft. You know, there is a school of design leaders who are wonderful and design managers who are wonderful and are great managers. But there can be a lack of credibility with them if they actually have never done the work themselves. And so that was my philosophy why that was so important. The reality is, is that it’s like our center and our core of understanding the work and how the work gets done and making sure that our teams are always able to do that work. So I will say I do not make comps in Figma myself. I am in Figma looking at Figma, you know, whiteboarding with the team, putting notes in Figma. I’m not pushing the pixels, but it is still the craft of what is the best way to craft this experience? How do we understand the user? Things like that. So just to let people know where my edges are. And then to get back to your question, I actually missed it. Jesse: Mm hmm. Christina: You know, and sometimes this is a blessing and a curse for some people, right? That, you know, the thing that you’re good at and then you miss it. And then it’s very comfortable to be able to go back to it. And it’s about achieving the right amount of balance. I am definitely doing a massive operational overhaul here. I get to do that here, right. I get to think about how I’m making an organization at scale, building all of those things in and what’s going to be the right thing for us, for the long haul and to set the team up for true success, make a great culture, etc, etc. But having a good balance with the craft is really important. And being able to say, I can walk into the CEO’s office and really defend that what we’re doing is right, and be able to talk about it probably within my first 30 days of, I know that we are going to be able to make a competitively different solution for this because I’ve already been in the sessions where we have come up with it, makes you feel really good that you’re not in those first 30 days being like, what am I going to do? What kind of value am I going to add? It gives you fuel to then keep going, to keep growing, to keep being able to do more. So that’s how I kind of look at it. It’s almost like it’s low hanging fruit in a way. Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard. So it’s not that kind of low hanging fruit, but it’s like relying on something that you know. Peter: You’re a relatively new leader, things moved quickly. I’m curious about the team you’ve inherited. That could put the team that you’ve inherited feeling anxious, uncertain, hopeful, all kinds of things. Christina: Yes, I’m sure they felt all of those things. Yeah. Enabling psychological safety Peter: Well, and, based on our conversations and things that you’ve presented in the past, I get the sense that you’re attuned to the state of your team. And I’m wondering, as part of this first 90 days, how you’ve engaged them, what you’ve heard from them, and what are you doing to bring them along into this period of rapid change that you’re leading? Christina: Yeah. So one of the things that’s interesting about the team is that they’ve already been undergoing this change for over six months now without me. And this is something that’s actually happened to me quite a bit, is that I come into roles where the position has been open longer. For some odd reason, the design team seems to have a lack of leadership. And then the team is extra anxious because all of this change is happening around them. And they’re the one team without a leader. I don’t know if I’m attracted to those kinds of situations or what the correlation is with that, but that happens to me. So yeah, so a lot of this change has been happening prior to me joining. So for about six or seven months, they’ve already been in it. What they’ve told me is actually having a leader has been helpful. And then one of the first things that I did was try to figure out how to actually bring them all together. ‘Cause some of them, though they’ve been there for multiple years, have never met each other in person. You know, if you joined within the past three or four years, you’ve been working with people for a very long time. But because of the pandemic and then additional change, you’ve never met someone in person. For me, it’s like, I want to meet everyone. I want them to meet each other. I want to make sure that we’re starting to really build a culture of working together and having a culture of open critique so that we can move fast and really try and make great work together. I brought the whole team together to New York and we did a design sprint for a week, and it was definitely a new way of working for a majority of them. But it was also fun, right, and that they could see we could do something quickly, if we did it together. Making sure that we had happy hour the very first night that everyone was together was really important. Most people are like, oh, I don’t want to have happy hour on a Monday, you know, I just got here. But, it’s important to make sure that people let off steam, have a good time, actually get to know each other, so that the hard parts of the rest of the week are less hard. Peter: Of the things I think a lot about, and I’m wondering if it’s possible to accelerate, is your team’s sense of psychological safety, right? We know how important that is, particularly for designing UXers, in order to do their best work. And in moments of uncertainty and moments of change in certain corporate cultures it can be hard to feel that. And I’m wondering how specifically attentive you’ve been to that, and if you’ve got tools or, practices or behaviors or something you’re doing to try to bolster that? Christina: Absolutely. I’m very attuned to it and actually have a couple of small techniques that I think anyone could follow or could try that I’ve been doing. So one is having a regular time for critique. That is not me-centered, but the team-centered. One, I bring work to that so that we can talk about the things that I’m involved in that they may not be involved in, so that they can actually know that I’m open to hearing things from them and getting input from them. So that it’s okay, we’re just working together. That I think was really important. Things that I would share might not, again, be a beautiful comp, but it might be a strategy on something or it might be a flow on something or something like that. Or it might be an approach to something, but so that they can actually give me input. And then allowing it to be a conversation where I ask other people’s opinions, where it’s not just my opinion. So though it’s a meeting that I set and that it’s a time where everyone makes sure that they have access to me, right now it’s three days a week. So every other day. So that there’s always reserved time on my calendar for them. They know they can always get me at that time. I don’t know that it will stay at that, but right now that’s where we are. Other things are how I show up, in conversations and even in Slack, where I, make sure I’m deputizing people to have ownership over things. Actually, the other day someone commented on it of, Oh, you replied to something and said, this person is the owner of this topic, which we know you were working on with them, but you gave it to them to own. And therefore you weren’t going to be a bottleneck, but it also showed a deep trust and it allowed everyone to know that I indeed trusted this person, trusted their ideas and just so happened that she was more on the junior side on the team. So it also showed that it doesn’t matter what level you are, that if you’re showing up, doing great work, that that’s what matters here. So you can be your best selves no matter what. Destigmatizing mental health Christina: And then I would say another thing that I do is I try to create a safer environment for our entire organization. I’ve done it twice now, but we have town halls every two weeks across the entire technology organization. And I try destigmatizing mental health in those meetings, and so I will actively, vulnerably talk about my own mental health, and use situations where I have the floor, to what, I think, sometimes… they won’t be surprised about it anymore, but the first time I did it, very much surprised people. Peter: Did they know? Cause you’ve been public about this. Was this part of the hiring process? Like, did some people know that this is something that you advocate for? Was that a side benefit of you being in this organization? Christina: I think for them it’s a side benefit and it’s also like you do you sort of type thing, you know, like no one told me like, Oh, we want you to do that here, right? Where sometimes when I talk to people they’re like we really need that, you know, That wasn’t one of the main reasons, right? But, we were having a conversation around trying to help people So, we’re moving very quickly. There’s so many things going on. And we’re also global. So we’re in multiple time zones. People were giving feedback that it feels very hard to have work-life balance because we work with people in London, we work with people in Los Angeles, and some people work with people even more further abroad than those locations, and so that leads to a mentality of being always on. And so we were giving tips as senior leaders, setting out principles for how we don’t want that for everyone, and how we think about that, and things like that. And so the tip that I got to talk about was time shifting. And it just so happens that our office is near my old office from maybe ten-ish years ago. And so my therapist that I have seen for a decade, her in-person office is now six blocks from my office now, and so what I was telling everyone is that, hey, on Tuesdays, you’re gonna see that I walk out the door right at five o’clock, and that I might come on later to check Slacks and whatnot, but don’t worry, I will be scheduling Slacks and I’ll be scheduling emails so that I’m not going to bother you, but the reason why I’m doing this is because now I can go to my therapist, my shrink, in person, and I, think there were probably gasps because I said, I go to my therapist. So, you know, moments like that, where I just sort of tell people that this is a thing and that it’s okay and that it’s normal and it normalized that for the entire organization really helps to drive psychological safety for my team as well. Jesse: I’d love to hear some more about the value you see in putting yourself out there in that way as a leader. And you know, for design leaders who might not yet get why that’s important or why that might be valuable. What is it for you? Christina: Thank you for asking me that question. So I’ve actually done a lot of research in the healing space and I’m sure if people have seen any of my other talks, they’ll know that I talk pretty openly about my own healing journey from complex post traumatic stress disorder. And one of the things that I’ve learned in my research for that, and on my healing journey, is that if senior leaders are vulnerable, it makes it safer for anyone else to actually understand and have the tone set for them to know what’s acceptable and possible in their work environment. That, for me, hit home so hard that, if I can share, maybe somebody else can feel just slightly more that who they are is acceptable, that they can take care of themselves and ask for help or seek the things that they need, that they don’t have to fear any issues or any retaliation around those topics because I’m out there talking about them and normalizing them, very often. And also, I have found that when I make myself vulnerable, it makes me more relatable. I’m sure you’ve heard from other design leaders that it’s a very lonely job. Jesse: Yeah. Christina: And, one of the reasons why I think is because you lose some of the camaraderie that happens with other designers when you ascend to you know, the highest levels. And so your entire career, you’ve been with other designers who are in the same boat as you, who understand you to a certain extent. And then when you graduate to be a design leader, design executive, now your peers are all cross functional. And your team treats you differently because you’re their leader, even if you yourself don’t feel differently. And so when you share, it makes you more likely to have a personal relationship with those on your team because now they see you as a real human as opposed to just a leader. And so I actually find that it gives me something back, too, like it allows me to have more with the team. Peter: And when you say with the team, I’m assuming you mean the team that you lead, your design and user experience team, because I’m wondering, somewhere, here it is, you know, I have my Patrick Lencioni, right? Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He talks about one’s first team, which is, that cross functional team. And I’m wondering how your approach has lowered barriers, that might not be the right word, but has made you more accessible and made your cross functional peers more comfortable relating to you, in a way that allows you to feel less lonely, even if they’re not fellow designers, you’re all part of a team trying to move things forward for the business, and what impact has it had for you in those cross functional relationships? Christina: It’s also extremely beneficial. I feel so connected and supported and helped by my cross functional peers. And I also think it’s because I’m willing to show up and say, Hey, this is who I am. I’m advocating for all of us, but also I need help. I’m willing to say those words. And, that exchange makes it so that we can be really real with each other, and then you can go so much deeper with someone and understand what they’re actually trying to achieve and get to a very win-win situation, because you now know that you’re working towards the same thing. You can connect on that deeper level. And so I think it’s been extremely beneficial for me to also do that. Because I say things that they might need to hear. Or that they’re so happy I said because they were thinking them, but didn’t have the words to say them themselves. Things like that. And so it also makes it easier for them in a sense. Peter: We’re approaching this as an unalloyed good, and I’m wondering though, if you’ve ever overshared, if you’ve been in contexts where it didn’t work, where it actually got a little blowback, either someone else wasn’t ready to be as open or as vulnerable, or in a certain corporate culture, it was just like that doesn’t work here or anything like that, or if it has always worked for you. Christina: No, it hasn’t. I’ve really only been in this mode of sharing since 2020 and pandemic times, when it’s really been, you know, sort of dire for us as a society. And I have, in difficult environments, like I started to share more at Accenture. And that was actually a really interesting experiment for me, where I actually, was treated very well and very respectfully when I did share. But previously at another job, multiple jobs ago, when I was very close with someone, that was, let’s say, someone higher in the food chain than myself, and had shared, I definitely felt that there was retaliation against me for sharing. And I definitely don’t think that I overshared, but it felt like just sharing and them knowing that about me put me in an extremely vulnerable position. Ever since then, I’ve been extremely cautious and then also have tried to figure out how can I make this better for others. I’m also dyslexic, and so there’s a lot of conversation in neurodiversity circles about do you disclose, do you not disclose, and that’s actually a pretty also interesting one for a lot of people to talk about, too, where I’ve definitely met people who are in environments where they will not disclose because they know those environments will basically start to try and exit them out of their organizations. Whereas for me and design, accessibility is half of our job sometimes. And so having the ability to talk about processing differently and how it helps me with my job actually is a benefit to me. So I also feel very privileged in that now I’m at a leadership level and have less fears about disclosure. That also I’m in a field where certain aspects of the things I disclose are actually pretty much always beneficial. But it’s definitely, you know, I’m not going to tell everyone to just run out there and tell everybody everything, because I, I’ve seen it go poorly for me and for others, you know? Jesse: It’s such an interesting cultural challenge, because as much safety as you might be able to create when people are interacting with you personally, that second order, that second degree of safety beyond you out into the larger organization, I think becomes the real challenge of actually encouraging other people to show up in similar ways. So it’s not just about how people behave when you’re in the room. What do you do to encourage, not just vulnerability and psychological safety, but, leadership traits and leadership values in the leaders that you bring up within your organizations? Stakeholder management Christina: The best thing that I can do is help people become really good at stakeholder management because we can be the best leaders that we can possibly be, but if we can’t manage other relationships, whatever you’re doing internal to your team, can all, you know, can all go to hell, right? I didn’t actually plan to be in design when I was a child. I wanted to be an anthropologist. Peter: Couldn’t hack it though, could ya? I have an anthropology degree. Christina: Oh, amazing. So no, I wanted to use the Internet, you know, data viz on maps to do some more predictive modeling in the field. And in the mid 90s, it was like a no-go. Peter: Now that’s how they find lost cities in the Amazon, but not then. Christina: No! Yeah, definitely. It’s a whole new day. But really teaching people a design based framework for stakeholder management so that they can do it, and become studies of their partners, and other techniques in order to shore themselves up and understand the world and have decision making. That, I think, is how you can help design leaders be prepared for the future and to be able to lead and set the right tone because they can, in a sense, defend themselves, and that they can move ahead and advance the right agendas. And I do have some elaborate frameworks for that. I don’t know if you want me to go into it. Peter: Maybe, well I don’t know about elaborate, but, you know something that I end up talking a fair bit about is the need for designers to change their own mindset. Designers do more to constrain themselves than anyone else. And part of it is thinking that the work stands on its own without any communication. And part of it is politics. Like you don’t advance any agenda without playing politics, and, you called it stakeholder management, I call it playing politics. They’re kind of the same thing. I mean, there’s different shades to it, right? And so maybe this question then: How have you helped, because I’m sure you’ve had folks who have been resistant to that, right? What have you found helps others see the opportunity and the value of these more political approaches? Jesse: How do you help designers get over themselves? Peter: Sure. Christina: Okay. I can actually answer it from that lens, Jesse. So, I’ll quickly talk about one of my frameworks and that is a proto-persona-based approach to stakeholder management. It is explaining to your team or the person, first thing is to manage towards outcomes. When someone comes to you and constantly says, I can’t get my ideas heard, I can’t do X, Y, and Z, I’m not being effective, nobody listens to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s the best right time to help someone have a design-based methodology to overcome that. Other people will, you know, give people, conversations around executive presence, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m like, no, let me give you something a little bit more tactical to do, and I’m going to be a, little bit silly about it, but I basically talked to this designer, let’s say, and it’s best if it’s done at least in a group of three people, to figure out who their target is that they are trying to make change with or convince of something, and that they basically need to study them. Sometimes I use the word stalk, but really it’s, try to get into their mindset and follow things like, what kind of questions do they repeatedly ask? What kind of data sources do they trust more than others? How do they make decisions on a regular basis? And actually catalog these things and make a little proto-persona about that person. And then to go into a role-playing exercise where there are at least three people doing three roles, and you have to do all three roles, where one person plays the target, one person plays the presenter, one person is a note taker, and you go through a scenario, and everyone is in a different format, right. The note taker is actually really important because they can see the whole scene, and give more holistic feedback, but when you’re embodying the person and when you’re actually trying to talk about the thing to the person and doing that three times gives you enough practice, right, that you can actually start to think more like that person, have more empathy for that person and get muscle memory about how that person might react and therefore how you can help that person see your point of view. And it I think relates well to designers because it’s using things that they already use in just a way that actually serves them in a different way. Peter: As you were talking, I found myself Googling “empathy map,” right? Like, many of us use empathy maps in our work. What would it be like to do that for our stakeholders? Not just for our users or customers. Jesse: Yeah. Well, I regularly recommend to my clients that as they’re heading into big stakeholder meetings to write a user research protocol, exactly like you would for… Christina: yes. Jesse: … user analysis. You know, it’s the same thing. Christina: That’s so great, Jesse. wonderful. I love that. Yeah. Yeah, and then of course I have more esoteric opportunities that not everyone’s open to, but, I definitely have another line of opportunity where you might look at the world through the lens of tarot cards, or try to access your subconscious through shaman— Peter: I thought you were going to start talking ayahuasca… Jesse: Different podcast, Peter. Peter: ..it is called Finding Our Way, you know, going on that journey. Shamanism as leadership practice Christina: Yeah, shamanic journeying and breathwork though, breathwork is a completely natural version of psychedelic journeying. So… Peter: is that something you do with stakeholders? Do you breath work with stakeholders or is that something that you teach people to do with themselves and it allows them to show up better, or is, is there a group aspect to it? Christina: I teach people to do it with themselves or in a small group, not with stakeholders, so that they can actually get to know themselves and tap into their subconscious to understand a situation better and to learn how to move forward. It can be pretty helpful. It’s very similar to, I think, the psychology of traditional design thinking techniques, things like liminal spaces or things like systematic brainstorming techniques when you’re pushing two ideas together to get to a new idea. Having regular access to your subconscious, we normally use it for brainstorming, for innovation, but it can be really, really helpful if you have that window into there, if you’re actually trying to use it to solve problems dealing with people, dealing with business challenges. It can be really powerful if people know that they have access to that too. Jesse: There are always interesting sort of cultural headwinds that we face when introducing techniques that maybe haven’t been covered yet in the Harvard Business Review. Christina: Right, right. Jesse: And I wonder about what it takes to lessen the fear of the unknown here for people, and help people embrace new frameworks, new ways of thinking about, and doing the job that they think they already understand how to do. Christina: Yeah. So one, it definitely helps when I lead with like, oh, I’m,y You know, the design leader that has an MBA, and I like to back stuff up with data and things like that, that gives me a little bit more credibility. Jesse: Mm hmm. Sure. Christina: It’s a little helpful in that sense. But in a sense there are gateway drugs. Um, Jesse: Uh huh. Christina: Metaphorically, right? So you can have people think about things like relaxation techniques, with basic breath practices, or talk about meditation a lot, and not call it that we’re going to do breath work. You know, like you can sort of help people get into something. But also what I like to do is, if I’m really trying to convince someone to try one of these techniques, is walk them through the larger landscape, show them how it fits into a larger design practice, how it is very similar to other techniques that they use, talk about the neuroscience and the psychology behind it, and try to say this is a technique you can use regardless of its origins and that If you want to give it a try, you can. But the reality is that so many people are mystical-curious right now that it’s actually not that hard. So, when I was at Etsy and we saw all that sales data, all, like, huge trends were in New Age rituals and in, like, sometimes during the holidays, psychic readings and drawings would pop as, like, number one, number five product across the board. Like, the number one selling product would be one of those items. Jesse: Wow. So maybe there’s more cultural permission out there than leaders might think. Christina: Exactly. Exactly. Peter: We talked a little bit about playbooks and frameworks, but as you’re looking forward, and as you’re looking at now, it sounds like growing your organization and you’ve been inside scaling organizations, I’m assuming, you just came from a scaled organization and you’ve had a chance to like, I don’t know if step back is quite right, but you know, you’re operating currently with a smaller team, though you’re going to be growing it to some greater size. And I’m wondering, what you’ve learned in your past that is maybe changing how you’re thinking about scale and growth this time around, how are you approaching this opportunity differently than you might have four or five years ago? Christina: Oh, absolutely. Well, I’m like, I have a framework for everything. Peter: Hey, Frameworks are my love language. Christina: Yeah. So I, think what’s been great about being in scaled organizations and in scaling organizations is it has allowed me to try and make some sense of that. And so I do have a nine part framework of everywhere that I want to look and investigate, so that something, like, I know I can come into a very fast moving situation where I have to go quickly and start to make my playbook so that I know how to tackle things and move forward. Peter: And not just simply be reactive, but that you have an agenda that you’re bringing to bear, even without all the information. Christina: Absolutely, absolutely. it’s gonna have me do things like, make sure I am from day one ground in the business goals. And if I can’t figure that out, then I can’t set the tone for the rest of the aspects of the framework. And hopefully I am figuring out those business goals even in the hiring process so that I know what I’m getting myself into oftentimes. And then trying to assess, basically, where I think the design org is and, I’m sure you guys talk about this as design maturity and things like that, but, what’s the overall approach of the design team that’s there, and how the larger company or organization as a whole reacts to it and values it and interacts with it. And what might be needed in order to make a shift there to an ideal state or better or more ideal state? And then some of it is just the mechanics of given that sort of landscape, what’s the best kind of organizational model? Should we go after what’s the right kind of ratios regarding cross functional teams that is going to make us successful right now, making sure that those mechanics are in place very early. So that if I haven’t gotten the head count, I know how to go get that head count or to fight for that head count. And then starting to think about the team itself, you know, looking at their career paths, career ladders, thinking about longevity, thinking about the transparency there that becomes really important because if your team doesn’t actually know where they are and where they can go, it also makes it harder to help move and shift them into different ways of working or into growth patterns. I feel like, even though it’s been a hard year or so, I’m clearly stepping into an organization and hiring and growing. I think that most design leaders still tend to do this. So, then it’s getting those kinds of systems down. How are we going to go about recruiting? How are we going to go about onboarding? How are we going to make that work really efficiently so that we get other people in that help fuel us, in that they’re able to hit the ground running too, you know. And then more things around development, leadership, and coaching styles of the team looking around those areas Trying to make sure that everyone sort of has that right culture fit and is doing the right thing to keep fostering all that stuff that you’ve put in place. And then probably things like communications comes into play a lot, I would say, yeah, like making sure that I’m having the right amount of communications and transparency, setting context, helping the team really understand what’s going on, how to do their work, how to put it in context, how to keep moving forward and understanding the larger business context. Yeah. And then, you know, whatever we can do to continue to develop that culture of rituals and, make sure it’s happy and thriving. Jesse: I love it. What an optimistic vision. Christina, thank you so much for being with us. This has been great. If people want to find you on the internet, where can they do that? Christina: Yes. So I am definitely on LinkedIn, though right now my inbox is a little full since I put out that I was hiring. Jesse: That’ll happen. Christina: So that might not be the most effective means of finding me. So, but yeah, under Christina Goldschmidt, you can try. I’ll try to get back to you. But also I’m on Instagram christinaonUX. Is a fun way to see all the other crafting things that I’m up to outside of the office. That’s always fun. Peter: Thank you so much for joining us. Christina: Yes, thanks for having me! Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript [This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Please forgive any copy errors.] Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: On today’s show, one of the largest scale and highest precision plastics manufacturing operations in the world belongs to Denmark’s LEGO Group. LEGO’s Rebecca Nordstrom leads the team designing the software they use to produce those billions of little bricks. She joins us today to talk about bringing UX to the factory floor, measuring success when user adoption is mandatory, and the differences between leading design in North America and in Europe. Peter: Thank you so much, Rebecca, for joining us today. Rebecca: Thank you for having me. Peter: Typically we start our conversations with a very easy question, which is: who are you and what do you do? What’s your job? What’s your role? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Rebecca: Yep. So I am the head of digital product design for our area inside of digital technology inside of the larger LEGO Group. So, LEGO Group is a little bit of an onion organization, if you will, and inside that we have digital technology, which is responsible for all of the external digital tools that our customers and play experiences support, but also we have a lot of internal. And then I am in charge of a digital product design team of around 20 folks and we are primarily supporting internal-facing applications. So, these are supply chain and manufacturing. So it’s a little bit of a different flavor. And I hope that listeners are not disappointed that we’re not going to talk about the fun LEGO play experience. But I think we really do some fabulous work where it is focusing on enterprise design work, supporting folks in the factories, folks in supply chain, and it’s a lot of really tricky, complex problems. But we also get to deal with a lot of kind of cutting edge technology and the things that we interact with, which is really fun. Peter: You mentioned the factory and supply chain, like I’m assuming there’s like internal design and development. What’s your relationship to that, if anything? Rebecca: Yeah. So for the internal design and development, we have product teams, and my team is the design resource into those product teams. And then we have product managers, which sit on the business side. And then we’ve got engineers inside those product teams as well, which sit kind of in the same area as me in digital technology. So, the product teams straddle both sides of the organization, if you will, and then they are dedicated into kind of user group areas within LEGO. So we have a product team, for example, all around packing. And so that is supporting all of the packing functions that help produce the finished LEGO good that leaves. Yep. I don’t know, I feel like, I feel like the stuff that happens behind the scenes in large organizations like LEGO is like this hidden gem that nobody really ever talks about or looks at, but there’s so much interesting things and like fantastic work happening there. Design for Internal Tools Peter: What’s the top thing that no one knows about that you wish they did? Rebecca: I think one is that we, we strive to create those play experiences for our internal employees inside LEGO as well. So even the factory workers should get that fun, enjoyable experience because we have that people promise to them. So we are creating, you know, polished end products, even with like the little microinteractions and animations and all of those things into it, for the factory workers. And I think that’s something that, unless you really, like, pull back the cover, you would never know that about LEGO. And we do that in a lot of organizations, actually, not just LEGO, but I think we have a high promise to our employees in that way. Jesse: it’s fascinating to think about the tension between playful experiences and supply chain and manufacturing logistics. And so I am curious about how products even get conceptualized in an environment like that. I feel like a traditional, kind of, requirements definition approach is not going to quite capture it for you guys, right? Rebecca: Yep, so typically we are approached with a business problem that needs solving. Either that we need to cut down the cost for manufacturing the finished good, that’s the one that we are constantly kind of battling year over year, because we always need to drive down cost, right? And so then what we do is we work with business. So the designers will go out and start researching with business on the processes that they’re involved in and start to identify different areas where we can change the process, and so, in that way, a lot of time, we’re not doing kind of traditional digital design in that way, but it’s really looking at end to end process, and how do we redesign the entire process and experience that we’re supporting in the shop floor. And how can digital tools play a role in that, and then working together with business to kind of tear that apart and put it back together. Jesse: I imagine that entails a different kind of a partnership with the business than you might see in other places. Because you need that deep process expertise at the table, right? Rebecca: Yep, so we have designers embedded into the product team. So they’re not, we don’t work as a agency or consulting centralized team. We’re embedded into the product teams, and in those then the designers over time are getting those relationships with all of the stakeholders in the business, but they’re also getting a lot of domain knowledge in there. So you can go in and talk to the designer that’s working in the molding area and ask her about all of the different settings and all of the processes to do with like molding and manufacturing. And by the way, LEGO is the largest producer of tires in the world. If you don’t know that. So like we are, we are a massive manufacturing company actually, and that’s kind of at heart of what everything does. And so the designers really deeply know those areas and those processes, and they are experts in their own way of that. But also you need that expertise to be able to talk to business about it too, because it’s not, it’s not an app for buying a cup of coffee where it’s super relatable, Jesse: Mm hmm. Rebecca: it’s getting into these really complex and engineering-focused processes. And so you have to be able to speak a bit of the language with the users for them to trust you and to open up. Peter: Nothing against apps for buying cups of coffee. Rebecca: No, those are, those are wonderful too, but I think, I think it’s like a totally different end of the spectrum of like what we deal with. Yeah. Peter: I’m wondering then, as you’re looking to build your team, right? Because you’ve had looking at your LinkedIn, I’ve seen you’ve had jobs in corporate America. I don’t know exactly… I saw Capital Group and Kaiser Permanente, so large legacy organizations. Then you’re now at LEGO. You’re working in this really specialized environment, like, like an uncommon one. Hiring for specialized environments Peter: Not that many people are probably working on the design of manufacturing and supply chains. And I’m wondering how that, that has caused you to shift how you approach recruiting and hiring, or your orientation on skills. Like what is it you’re looking for in building your team that might’ve been different than the kinds of things you were considering in the past. Rebecca: Yeah, I think one is, people that really fall in love with the problem, right? So it’s not people that are super focused on the solution all the time, but that can really fall in love with the problem. So they are willing to spend time investigating that problem, spend time understanding it, and really understand all of the, the nuances and edges to the problem. So we get these like really crazy wicked problems of… you have all of these VPs and stuff and they’re looking at it and they’re like, we don’t know what to do. And then we get some of the design team in there. And so they need to fall in love with that problem as number one and really enjoy that it is complex. And you’ve got some really amazing designers that that is their sweet spot. They don’t, they don’t want the, the easy showy stuff. They want the stuff where they know this is going to take a bunch of iterations to really smooth this out and understand where the places that we can move and where are the places that we can’t move. So I think it’s, it’s that problem that’s number one and then the other one is just really strong collaboration skills, because part of what we also face on a regular basis is the change management portion of design as well. So for like consumer-facing things, you can kind of release it. And then the adoption of it as a proof point that you’ve made something of value to the consumer-facing audience. That’s not really true when you talk about internal applications, because it’s a mandated use of those applications, and so the adoption of it and the change management of that is a totally different beast, right? Where you need to be working with the training organizations to understand what are their obstacles around the change that you’re proposing, working with all of the different local teams that should be adopting it to also understand what’s their point of view because they adopt, like, local practices towards their work as well. So it’s kind of the problem, and the stakeholder management, and collaboration and the ability to kind of lean into those things. So it’s, it’s maybe less of a traditional design role where you’d get a brief and then get to kind of rock and roll and create something that’s really, really fun in that aspect, but enjoying the other types of problems in there. Jesse: And in your role as leader, how close do you get to these problems? Rebecca: So when I joined LEGO Group five years ago, I was actually an individual contributor in a team. And I was the first designer that they hired in to my area inside LEGO Group. So at that point I was kind of acting as individual contributor. And then over the last five years, we formed a team of 20 people and I’m head of this larger department. And so I’m more triage for some of these things and to be the glue between all of the different applications that we work on as well. So when we have supply chain and manufacturing, all of those pieces need to kind of flow together this bigger system design. And so my role now is kind of to look across and to spot where we need teams to be collaborating, where do we need designers to be collaborating, and then encourage as much as possible for our designers to steal from each other with pride. Like don’t, don’t keep reinventing something. Like we have our Figma files completely open and people should be in each other’s Figma files. They should be copying each other’s work. They should be leaving comments and asking questions and trying to, to bridge it so that it is cohesive across. Jesse: Well, it’s this interesting balance that you have to strike because you have this need for deep specialization and expertise, kind of team by team. But then you need something that’s going to hold all of them together in some way. How do you do that? Rebecca: I think one is, so I’m partnering with the heads of product in that way to create kind of the bigger picture of those larger cross-product initiatives that need to happen. And part of that is also the vision and they’re calling it roadmap. And I really cringe at the word roadmap usually, but, so they call it roadmap of where manufacturing should be going. So part of it is to see, okay, in, you know, 3, 5 years, what is the ambition from the LEGO Group of where they want to bring supply chain and manufacturing, and from the knowledge that I know about the product teams, how does that piece together to move towards that, and then we have a lot of recurring sessions together with the heads of product and engineering and the product teams to then review what they’re planning to work on and get it there. So I think it’s more in that trio function, I’m playing at kind of like that leadership level to then steer the direction of the product teams and help coach the designers to support that bigger vision. Jesse: Mm hmm. Rebecca: But it’s, it’s chaos, honestly, right? Like it’s, you know, it sounds all good and it sounds like we have a nice plan and a path there, but it is constantly things popping up and it is a bit chaotic, but that’s part of the fun. Peter: Chaotic because you’re responding to what? Rebecca: Chaotic because we have 30 product teams and 600 plus applications inside those 30 product teams. And then we’ve got 5 factories, soon to be 7 factories around the world that each have their own set of stakeholders and want to have a say in what’s going on? So it’s, it’s a big communication game sometimes. Jesse: And are you also operating in that trio mode when you’re engaging the stakeholders? Rebecca: Yep. So we try to have the trio within the product team. So with one of the designers in the product team, the product manager, and one of the more senior engineers, and then we also have the trio at the leadership level. So head of design, head of engineering, head of products working together and this kind of trio at the leadership level. That’s the one that is engaging with a lot of the different stakeholders across the factories and across the supply chain, because they also have those kind of leadership hierarchies and are trying to put together plans at these wheel levels or leadership levels. Yeah. The intersection of physical and digital Peter: And you’re… I’m curious. You’re the head of digital product design. So your team is largely building software or designing software. And that’s what these groups are doing. But I, I’m imagining there’s a need for integration between your software stuff and some form of hardware physical manufacture… like when I think manufacturing I’m thinking giant robot arms moving things around, and so like, where does your design end? Where does other design begin? How do you coordinate and integrate with teams to make sure that it’s all coming together? Given what you said about the chaos, I can imagine part of the chaos is all these different modalities and kind of ways of working. Rebecca: Yeah, no, you’re totally right about that. I think with the integration with the hardware that’s in the shop floors and the factories, that is a different team. So there’s a operations technology team that handles the purchase and design of that hardware, but by and large, it’s off the shelf purchases for that. So that team is kind of screening which hardware we should purchase. And then it would come into ours to deal with, okay, how does somebody actually interact with that hardware now? And more and more we’re learning that that decision, when they’re purchasing the hardware, needs to start engaging with the design team as well, because we see that we purchase a lot of hardware where there’s built-in interfaces that are completely unusable, or there’s clashes between the way that the hardware operates and the process of how the user actually needs to interact with that hardware. So, I think more and more, we’ve kind of learned our lesson that it needs to be this holistic approach where we have the design team, the product team, and this operation technology, all looking at the tools that we’re buying, both in terms of software, but also hardware, to make sure that it actually works together. And we have a couple more collaborative initiatives that we’ve been running more recently where that’s been really successful. And it has been a nice kind of proof of concept of that collaboration. But I think the integration with the hardware is really like a fun thing for the team, actually, because like, you know, you, you’re doing something and you can physically see how it is interacting. And then we have some initiatives where the team, even though we’re digital product designers, we are designing things directly onto the hardware as well. So, whether it’s signals with lights and sounds and things like that, or screens that we’re mounting onto the hardware, that sort of stuff. Measuring success Jesse: You mentioned earlier that you don’t really have, you know, user adoption to guide you in terms of evaluating the success of a design, the success of a product. How do you measure the success of your work collectively, but also specifically for design? Rebecca: Yeah, I think one of the key things that we try to pay attention to is gray IT or shadow IT, depending on whatever you want to call it, but the systems and workarounds and tools that users are often creating themselves, because there’s a gap for them. Something is not working for them, so they’re going to solve it themselves. Jesse: hmm. Rebecca: So that’s a really good signal to us that something has gone wrong, or we’re not supporting the right thing. And so that’s often something that we are trying to pay attention to. Do we see that the shadow IT is going down? Do we see new things popping up in that area? If so, then we need to go do some research and figure out, you know, what’s going on. What need do you have that is not being met by the tools that we’re giving you? And another thing we’re trying to do is to get more data into the tools themselves. So, get user feedback integrated into the tools. So, just like a consumer app, they can rate the tool. They can provide feedback into the tool. They can capture screenshots of what’s going on and write back to the team and say, “Hey, this needs to be different.” So to get that feedback directly in from the users, interacting with it, and then also get analytics into the tools so that we can see that they’re actually completing the process that we want them to complete, but where are they getting stuck in there? Where is it taking too long or where do we actually see, because we kind of own the whole ecosystem, where do we see that they’re leaving this tool and going to that tool and coming back to this tool, because then we need to integrate. Peter: Kind of related to that, I’m wanting to go back to your story of 1 to 20, right? You started as a team of 1, now there’s a team of 20. In order for that to happen, I’m assuming value was made very clear and explicit. What was the nature of that value? How did others recognize what it was you were doing? How did you then build momentum to scale this organization? How did you have to navigate the organization? Were there any politics involved, or was it a fairly straightforward kind of business case? ” Let me hire 20 people. These 20 people can realize, you know, n number of millions of dollars in cost savings” or something like, what’s that story of, of one to 20? Nurturing organic growth Rebecca: Yeah, it’s, it’s really a very organic story, actually, and we still have the debate within the team and with the broader design community about value. And I think it’s something that we see people talk about all the time. What’s the value of design and how do you quantify that? But actually, I, kind of disagree with the whole concept that we should quantify the value of design. And I have not, I’ve not been a super vocal in LEGO about that either, because I think the value of design is in the success of the product, and it’s not a separate metric. It’s not something that we should be creating separate standards for design than the rest of the product team. Like, we should be functioning together with them. The success of the product is the success of the design. And so I think that’s mostly been my approach towards it as well. I think the thing that helped traction in there is that I started out on a project that was the third or fourth time that LEGO had tried to do it. And each time it had failed and cost several million crown, so hundreds of thousands of dollars, right, each time it fails. And I think they’d been trying to do it for four or five years at that point. And I came in and I took a design thinking approach and it was different than how they had approached it before and it succeeded that time. So I think the proof in the value in that was actually that it did succeed, that it was successful. It was a different way than how they had thought about doing it because we involved the users in the creation and the design of it through workshops, through research yeah, and involve the stakeholders in the testing. I actually got a lot of the stakeholders to be running the user testing themselves, which was a nice one. Jesse: Nice. Rebecca: Yeah, because they, because you know, like in these super specialized areas, you have these people who are SMEs or subject matter experts, and they want to own everything. They want to own the voice of the end users and be the representative, and that’s kind of their role in the organization. And one of the only ways that we kind of got around that was to have them be the user testers. So we say, you can own it, but you need to take this and then go actually run the tests for the users. And we train them in that. So I think the kind of success and pitch to the LEGO Group to build the team was just in the success of the initiatives that I was part of. And the fact that because I was part of them, they ran differently than they had previously. Peter: And so was it a matter of demand was being generated, and you were simply meeting the demand. More product teams are seeing that success and saying, Hey, we want some of that. And it’s like, well, you’re going to have to hire some new types of people and we’re going to have to engage in some new ways of working. And it just kind of slowly built over time. Rebecca: Yeah, it was, it was super organic like that. It was that that product started getting some momentum. We started getting some success in that people that I interacted with as part of that process said, Hey, can you come over and look at this other thing and help out with this? And it just kind of snowballs, right? So you start to get a reputation in the organization and it’s a very relationship-driven company at the LEGO Group. So you start to get a reputation, you start to get more people requesting you as a resource. And at that point I still wasn’t officially a manager or anything like that. So what I did was I started hiring in student workers cause I didn’t need approval for it. Jesse: Ha, ha, Rebecca: So I talked to some of the other managers and I was like, Hey, I’m going to hire in this student worker officially, they need to report to you, but I’ll take care of everything. So don’t worry about it. So we started kind of building the team there and getting different students around. And luckily I went to graduate school here, so I had relationship with some of the universities and things here already and the design programs. So we just started bringing people in, and over time, they were kind of like, okay, well, maybe they should report to you. I’m like, okay, cool. So then we just started kind of building from there. Yeah, it’s been really strange to look back at it and that it’s changed so much in 5 years, but it’s also been really organic and kind of natural in the shift there. There’s not been any big battle or pitch to it. It’s been based off of demand. Peter: What I’ve seen over and over again, as organizations grow, is there’s a point at which you can’t run it organically anymore when it’s six, seven, eight people, you can run it organically. It’s enough people that fit around a conference table. You can manage it pretty directly. When it’s 20 people, you now need to put some systems in place and some processes in place, or the chaos you were referring to kind of affecting you, you’re generating chaos if you don’t have something. So was there a, a liminal moment where you had to like, establish some organizational practices just within your team, to kind of manage this organicness. What did that look like? What ended up working for you? Liminal moments in growth Rebecca: Yeah, I think there’s been a couple key points in that journey where we’ve had to step back and say, okay, we need to restructure again. One was with me getting to the place where I can be holding the same conversation with the engineering leaders and managers, and then the product leaders and managers as well, so that we weren’t getting pulled in last moment into things as designers. And I think this is super-typical, right? They like, they’re going along and they have all these ideas and then they get there and they’re like, oh, we need somebody to make it look nice. Get the designer, right? So we needed to shift that at some point and make sure that we were up front in the work and part of the discovery and the research going into it and part of the foundation to the work. So I think part of that is getting me into the right place. Another one was when we started having design managers below me. So that’s also kind of a different shift, right? So you like leader of individual contributors and then you start being a leader of leaders. And that, that was actually really hard because you kind of let go of a little bit more there. And you think like, you want to know all the details. You want to know what’s going on in the product teams. And then you need to step back and let somebody else handle that and just trust that it’s going to go, but they’re not going to do it the way that you would do it if it was you running it. And so it’s a little bit of like, you know, passing your baby to daycare when you leave like maternity leave or something, right? You’re like, I trust you. I’ve read good reviews about you. Please take care. Yeah, so there was a little bit of that when we shifted having the competency leads or the design managers below. And then recently we’ve seen that we really needed to align more across the different squads now that are inside our design organization. And so with that, we’ve made a design definition of done, to help manage expectations toward the designers, but also to give them a clear role in the product team, because their role inside the product team was really varied, depending on the maturity of that team. So, for the really mature teams, they were integrated into the product trio, they were part of the decisions, part of driving the strategy. For other teams, they were getting, the UI work at the end, just in time for getting it out the door, but not getting integrated into the rest of the discussion. So we started working with a definition of done for design in there. Was a bit strange because I thought they would have one for the engineering as well, because I always picture that it’s like more mature than the design inside LEGO, because design is so much younger. But actually we see that the engineers are taking a lot of lead from the structure that we’re starting to put with design now, which is interesting. Jesse: That is interesting. It’s interesting to think about the influence of your design work and, for want of a better term, design thinking, extending beyond design activities, and I wonder, what advice you have for folks who are trying to extend their influence beyond design in that way? Rebecca: Yes. I don’t know that I have a magic, like the golden ticket of advice there. But I think at least my approach that has worked for myself, and I think everybody’s a little different, but what’s worked for me is to have in my head kind of where I want to drive things and then to not say no to opportunities and engagements and then just make those what I need them to be, if that makes sense. I can give a example that today, one of the heads of product came to me and they’re like, yeah, we need to do this thing around adoption within the factories, but from a compliance point of view, right? So, like, with the chief operating officer for all of the manufacturing across LEGO that he’s really interested and the factory is having compliance and stuff like that. So he came to me, can you help with that? Sure, why not? Not, not my field that I play in typically, but I think I’m really good at looking at those things and then thinking, okay, what’s the opportunity in here to, like, help my team move forward in there? So, like, in that example, I can see that we can talk about user adoption and there we can make sure that teams are better at getting those metrics in place. Getting the feedback in place. So all of those things can actually help ladder for that bigger story that they need that maybe is not traditionally design, but design can have a point of view and a voice into it and benefit from that getting there. So I think finding those little connections and ways that like design can help, but it can also help design in the backwards way. Those are good ones to spot. Peter: I’m wondering these five years you’ve grown organically, if you’ve seen certain things work and other things not work, right? And what are the things maybe that don’t work that you’re like, let’s not do that again. Let’s not try to evolve in those ways and instead lean into the things that have worked. What has shaken out in that way for you? Balancing structure and autonomy Rebecca: Yeah, I think something that I’ve learned over time is the need to provide structure and then back off. So when things grow organically, I tend to just be like, yeah, of course everybody’s on the same wavelength. Like we’re all moving together. We’re all, you know, it’s like we’re dancing together, right? But when the team starts to get to a certain size and when you have people of different maturity and experience inside design, you really need to provide a good frame for them, clear expectations, and then back off and let them do it. And that was like, that’s a really painful lesson to learn, honestly, because I want to trust everybody on my team, like, 110 percent and know that they have best intentions and believe that they are capable. But sometimes I’m too hands off and believing in their good intentions. And then you kind of get burned from that because things are not turning out as they should be, right? And then you need to step in. And so I’ve kind of learned over time that it’s much better to get those clear expectations, even a little bit too harshly and then let them run, rather than think that it’s okay and have to come in later. Peter: Is that where the definition of done has, has kind of emerged? What does that even, what does that mean? Rebecca: Yeah. So the definition of done is like requirements that we’ve put towards the product team of what they need in place before they are allowed to go live with something. So, from a design perspective, they need to tick all these boxes before they should be going live with something. And that is partially so that my team also has the right frame of expectations of, I expect you to do these five things before we go live with something. Otherwise, it’s not ready. So, I think that one works both ways though. So that’s helping the team. Have expectations toward the designers, but also the designers understand my expectations towards them. Jesse: It seems to me that with so many of these things that you’re talking about, the partnership that you have at the leadership level with product and with engineering, the opportunity you have to go wide with your design explorations and your efforts to understand users and their behavior, the opportunity that you have to be involved in the earliest stages, all of this stuff is stuff that lots and lots of design leaders dream of trying to attain and seems to be just kind of out of reach. So I, I wonder about what is the formula here? Why is this working? Rebecca: I got really lucky. I have a amazing manager. So I think that is part of why it’s working is that I have really just gotten as lucky as I could get in that I have an amazing manager who really believes in me and what the team is doing. And basically is there to just clear roadblocks and otherwise is like, whatever you want. Yeah, you got it. Like, go for it. Which is fantastic. So I don’t have a lot of handcuffs or push back from my manager in that. But he is also a really good advocate for me and the team with those other forums as well. So he asks, like, why isn’t design in this conversation? And when I meet new colleagues and heads of engineering and HR partners and things like that, and they ask, how can we support you? That’s usually the thing that I say, like, if you’re in a conversation and you don’t see design in the conversation, ask why, why is design not here? Because I think us being part of that conversation and it’s such an innocent question, right? Because there’s no bad intent from them from asking that. It’s a, it’s a kind of a very naive question if you want to like, ask in a conversation. So having them ask that on my behalf in the parts that I have not been included with has really helped me get included in them. Avoid UX fundamentalism# Rebecca: I think the other thing is, I see a lot of design managers and leaders that I interact with that are very like, kind of fundamentalists. So they, I don’t know if you, if you remember, like, maybe 5 or 10 years ago, all of the job postings, they wanted UX evangelists, right? You had to be like a, an evangelist and go on a crusade in your organization and, you know, tout the benefits of UX design or design thinking. And it was like a war zone that they were pitching in the job posts and stuff. And I think I’ve intentionally tried very hard not to have it at us versus them or battle in that way, but rather, Hey, you may not understand what I’m doing, but I’m here to help and just invite me in and I’ll, I’ll help you as best I can, and I’m not gonna be super dogmatic about the approach, but rather really, really flexible. And we’ll make it work. And if I play out of field, that’s okay. So I think that openness and flexibility and the lack of like strictness to the approaches. Yeah, exactly. That, like, I see people burn so many bridges with that stuff where it’s like, you know, they, they want to like take a design thinking approach and like hell or high water, like they’re going to do it by the book. And it’s like, that doesn’t work, man. Like those things are great. I have a whole bookcase full of books about those things, but that is just the starting point, right? That is not how you actually end up doing that in any organization. So I think also that really practical approach, if people want to get good traction, just be super practical. don’t kill yourself on the theory. Peter: I totally agree, but it raises a question, because you were mentioning earlier how your executive is advocating to make sure that you’re always in the room. Design should be in the room. But then what you were just saying is that design is happy to show up, roll up our sleeves and do whatever is needed in order to get things done. And so why design? What is the thing that design, as a function, the team that you’re building, bringing to that conversation? If what you’re bringing is just a willingness to do whatever it takes to get done, clearly there’s something that that has been recognized that your team is primarily responsible for, and I’m wondering kind of how that was defined, how you carve that out, in particular, your relationship with product. This is something Jesse and I talk a lot about and see, is there’s that uncertainty often, as design gets more strategic the relationship between design and product can get unclear in terms of who owns what or does what. So how have you carved out your niche, kind of established your space, that you and your team are doing, given this need for flexibility. Rebecca: Yeah, all honesty, I do think our input and role in the product teams is still blurry with the product side. So with the product managers, and then with the more senior designers in the team, there’s often that really blurry overlap in there because you talk about like product strategy and things like that, like, both are contributing into that. Who’s responsible for shaping what those epics are, shaping what that sequence and strategy for rolling out different features and things like that are, it’s often this kind of amalgamation of the designer and the product manager working together. I think the thing that my team is bringing that is otherwise absent in the product teams is the voice of the user. So it’s not business, and I know that in this case, the user is business, but business that comes from the business side is typically, like upper management, looking at cost savings, looking at, you know, increasing productivity, those sorts of things. And my team is coming in and bringing the user’s point of view about how is the process actually working or not working for them. And nobody else is willing to do that legwork, figure that out and to represent that and bring that into product team. So I think the methodology can vary. And I think the methodology is what I’m not really like dogmatic about, but the role and function of the designer to represent that user, bring in that voice and do the best thing for the user at the end of the day that I think we’re pretty, pretty strict about. Jesse: In that relationship between design and product and everybody side by side hashing out the roadmaps and so forth, I start to wonder about how disputes get resolved and how differing points of view get reconciled, in what’s supposed to be a partnership of equals. Rebecca: So between the product manager and the designer, for example, Jesse: Yeah, between yourself and your counterparts. Rebecca: I think within the product team and the designer, and it’s primarily the designer and the product manager that are sometimes stepping on each other’s toes in terms of roles and responsibilities there. Typically, when there’s really bad kind of conflict there, it’s because one is compensating for the other’s role. So that can be, yeah, we’ve had a couple of different cases where either the product manager is not doing what they need to do, or the designer is not doing what they need to do. And then they kind of are compensating on top of each other and stepping on each other’s toes in that way and then that, yeah, that can be an escalation to the different people leaders in that. It can also be that, sometimes if it’s the design, they’re compensating for the product manager. Actually, the guidance that I give is to just stop. And I know that sounds really mean, but at the same time, they’re not going to learn to do their job if we keep doing it for them. So sometimes they need to realize like that there is a gap and then stop and let there be a gap there, which is maybe not the friendliest approach to that. But yeah, we can’t do everybody else’s jobs all the time either. Leading design outside North America Peter: One of the reasons Jesse and I were really interested in speaking with you is you have experience leading design and outside of North America. And most of our conversations have been with people in North America, and we’ve gotten some feedback from listeners that they’d love to hear from design leaders outside of the United States and given that you’ve worked in the United States and now outside, I’m wondering what, if anything you see in terms of differences in how you’re able to lead design, if there is anything more broadly societal, cultural, whatever, that you find. I mean, you’re at LEGO, which is probably a pretty weird company, so I don’t know. Or maybe not, maybe it’s typical Danish company, but I’m, curious what you maybe had to unlearn in order to succeed in your new context? Anything as an anthropologist yourself now looking at these two ways of, being, what have you noticed? Rebecca: I think my experience in different companies in the U.S., so, and this is primarily with Kaiser Permanente and the Capital Group, was that things were very structured, right. So there’s clear hierarchy. There’s the design team, which is sitting with product in both of those cases. It’s very top down and you get the work once the work is defined and ready, either for the manager to then allocate out or the designer to tackle. So it’s, you’re not kind of opening up to the entire organization, right? It’s very kind of isolated and protected and padded. LEGO is not like that. LEGO is really, so it started out as a family run company. It’s still a family run company, but it’s grown to 7000 plus people. But it still acts like a family run company. And I think the feedback that I get from others coming from other parts of Denmark in organizations that have joined the team is that it’s pretty similar, where it’s really about, it’s about knowing people. It’s about taking the time to have coffee. So when people onboard, it’s not the work that you onboard to, it’s the people that you’re onboarding to. So you should set up and have coffees with like 45 people to get to know them. And when you interview, this was so weird when I was interviewing in Denmark, actually. So you go and the first things they talk about, like, I think 90 percent of the interview is not about your profession. It’s like, who are you? How many kids do you have? Where do you live? Where do you come from? Where are your parents from? You know, what are your hobbies? So, it’s all of these things that you’re not allowed to ask in the US, like at all. And a strange, like, add-on to working in Europe, I guess, but I’m also like the oddball because I’m not Danish and I’m not European. So maybe that also, it affects people’s impression of me and whether they want to work for me. That’s fair. I think part of what I do in those also is I share a fair amount of, like, personal stuff about me in those interviews as well, to kind of make it feel like an equal exchange, which would never happen in the U.S. Rebecca: And for the design, it’s not so tricky to make sure that we are having, all sorts of, like, folks from all around the world in the team– different, different religions, different nationalities, all sorts of dimensions. But I think for some of the other areas, it’s really hard, especially in Denmark, because it’s not the most diverse population here. Maybe it’s why they can get away with those questions, too. But it’s not the most diverse, like, you know what I mean? Like, it’s the, the majority of Denmark is Danes or Germans. Or maybe you get, you know, the odd Swede or Norwegian, but it’s not, as many nationalities coming together as you get in the US. Jesse: So, You’ve been on this journey with this group building up this competency from an idea, bringing these people into the fold. What I wonder about is what’s the next stage for what you’ve created? Where is it going? Coordinating UX/Design across LEGO Rebecca: Yeah, I think one is that right now I’m working with some of the other heads of design to get more of a design structure and community across all of digital technology then. So that would be both with the play experiences for the kids as well as the adult experiences and then the consumer. So LEGO.com and retail and things like that. So shopper retail. So bringing all of those design teams together so that we have some collaboration across, and learnings, because each team has different things that they’re more skilled in, just by nature of the work that they are doing. So one of the things… we’re having a creative boost around that, where we have some themes that are overarching themes that hit across kind of bigger domains in LEGO. And so typically product teams are not getting to deal with the themes. So we’re having all of the designers come together, in person, like gather from all the different teams around the world. And then we get to spend some time collaborating with the different designers across, see what pops out of that and then do a big exhibition and showcase with the Chief Digital Officer and see if we can get some of that work picked up into the portfolios. I think those kind of larger collaborations across the design teams within LEGO, that’s kind of where next focus is. Yep. Peter: Is there an existing design community of practice? Like, is there some connection already, or is this pretty new to bring these teams together? Rebecca: So the teams have never gotten together. So that part is new. We do have occasional Teams meetings where we’ll get on a call together and maybe talk about topics and things like that. The thing that I struggle with, with those kind of bigger forums is once you get, you know, 60, 70 designers on a call, it’s not really a conversation at that point. So somebody presents and then somebody has a different point of view and like maybe three people get to talk. Or people start to kind of spiral down on a certain topic and you can’t really like lift the conversation into something good again. So these kind of larger forums that we’ve tried to get together with these Teams calls and stuff are a little, they’re a little hit or miss. So I’m hoping that like getting people together and then having them form kind of mini teams where it’s people that they’ve not worked with before to then tackle these kind of cross domain themes hopefully that will kind of spark a little bit more community there as well. Peter: I’m also wondering if each of these distinct teams defines design differently, I’m thinking about it from a very kind of operational standpoint, like, do you have a shared job family that your user experience designers are using the same as others, or does every group, because I’ve seen where in big companies with federated design orgs, every team defines it differently, has their own job families, has their own recruiting and hiring practices, their own compensation bands. And then that can create this internal… more chaos as these folks start trying to come together and realizing it hasn’t been shaped coherently across the organization. Rebecca: Yeah, so we do have one single job family and we have clear descriptions of the different role levels in there. And then the salary bands for each of those is aligned. And so that’s across all of digital technology for design. The part that gets interesting is that we see some design role starting to pop up in the business side as well. And those are not necessarily falling into that job family, even though they’re interacting with the same product teams. And also the pay bands and stuff like that can be a bit different. So, within digital technology, we’re actually pretty good on the structure there. And over the last year and a half, we’ve been running a lot of workshops and sessions to get input on that and make sure that we’re aligned. So that part’s pretty set up. But I think because we’re inside the IT organization and then product is sitting over in business, product has started to kind of hire some of their own kind of rogue design roles over there. And then that’s kind of putting a little bit more, intrigue into the story around. Peter: Are they hiring UX designers or a different kind of like more strategic or service designer? Rebecca: Yeah, so it’s the user research and service design roles that they’re hiring over there. But the way that the archetype, so this digital product design archetype is written for within digital technology that should cover research and service design inside that archetype too. So it’s, a very kind of bland, broad umbrella for that. And then you can have specialties inside it, but that way the levels and the pay and things like that are pretty aligned. Peter: I’m curious, as your team has scaled and I’m assuming other teams have scaled, if you’ve instituted some type of design operations capability in order to handle within, say, your team, a lot of that communication and coordination across, you’ve mentioned like 30 product groups and all that kind of stuff, or operations to help keep these different design teams connected. Has that been something you’ve needed to institute in order to maintain this, to minimize chaos and maintain a community, or is it more just being done by the leaders kind of in fractional time? Rebecca: So, right now, it’s mostly done by the leaders in fractional time. It is something that we’re trying to push. So we’ve tried to put it into the portfolio objectives for the next year. I don’t know if it will get approved, but the idea that we then spin up a design ops across the whole digital organization though, so not having separate ops functions, but rather one across all of the different design works that are in there. I don’t know what will happen with that. I really hope that it gets picked up because even the tooling alone is like a huge pain point for the teams. Because we’re supposed to have owners for each of the tooling. And then that you have designers like managing licensing and things like that is just a waste of time. it’s just absurd. It’s like the most expensive licenses possible then, right. Peter: Yeah. Rebecca: It doesn’t make any sense. So hopefully that’s something that will come is that we start to get a more mature design ops set up within the organization. I would love that. I think it will happen though, because they’ve actually set up kind of an engineering ops in the original kind of restructuring with the digital transformation. So, I think it is coming to the maturity point with design that we also should have a design ops. Rebecca: And I think they start to see that. So… Peter: …there’s a model there that you can point to and go, it works for that function, we need something similar for ours. Rebecca: Exactly. Yep. Jesse: Rebecca, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being with us. If people want to find you on the internet, how can they do that? Rebecca: Yep, best way to do it is on LinkedIn and just look up Rebecca Nordstrom and if it says the LEGO Group next to me, then that’s the right one. There’s also Rebecca Nordstrom in Sweden who gets an awful lot of my mails. So don’t, don’t pick her. Peter: Sounds good. Thank you so much for joining us. Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript [This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Please forgive any copy errors.] Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz. Both: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: On today’s show, Cynthia Savard Saucier, co-author of the book Tragic Design and VP of UX for the Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify, joins us to talk about what’s worth fighting for and what’s not, sharpening the business acumen of her teams, and the strategic value of kindness. Peter: Hi, Cynthia. Thank you so much for joining us. Cynthia: Hi. Thank you for having me. Peter: So, if you could share with us what your role is, and I’m curious, because I know you’ve been there for a little while, how your role has evolved. Cynthia: Oh, yeah. One answer is faster than the second. So my role is four letters: VP UX. I like it. It’s very short and easy to reply. I’m vice president of user experience at Shopify. At Shopify, we use UX as a overarching word for content design, research, and design as well. So I lead all of those disciplines. In the past, I’ve had other roles at Shopify. So I started there almost nine years ago now when it was a much smaller company. I started as a designer, IC on the team. I was leading a smaller team at an agency before that, but I chose to join a tech company as an IC, and then I grew from designing the thing to leading one person and then the Montreal team, and then eventually becoming a director and then eventually leading the whole discipline at Shopify. And then recently I just made a bit of a horizontal shift where I chose to focus on the product. So now I am VP of UX for core. So I directly manage a team of around 200 people-ish in UX for core. Core is the core offering of Shopify. So it’s mainly the admin experience for our merchants. So that’s how I went from IC to VP in nine easy steps. Peter: Thinking about the organization, I know Shopify has gone from having a centralized UX org to a federated UX org. Did it then go back to centralized and now it’s federated again? Cynthia: It’s a bit of both, actually. So we had a chief design officer that was the co-founder of Shopify. So he had been there from the beginning. And when I joined Shopify, I was actually reporting into Daniel, who was the co-founder. However, as the team grew, we then went into product lines. So the whole organization got split into like a bunch of, I think, seven groups. After a while, we just reached the edges. Like we were, we were, like the seams were cracking from these groups or organizations, and then we reorg-ed the company into two larger groups. So there is core and merchant services. And now all of UX reports into UX into core and all of UX reports into UX into merchant services. So it is somewhat functionally reporting. All the way up to me and Andrea Manini, who is the VP of UX in merchant services. But under that, if you are a UX or you report into a UX leader all the way to me basically. So it’s federated and functional at same time. Peter: Andrea doesn’t report to you. She has a different… Cynthia: Exactly. So we both report into the leaders of these groups, basically. They both happen to be from product, but it’s not that UX reports into product. It’s that we happen to report into the person that also leads product. Peter: And given that you have these two UX teams, is there anything that’s holding the center of user experience at Shopify, or is Andrea able to kind of “do whatever you want,” and maybe it starts to diverge, or how do you make sure this stays aligned across your orgs? Jesse: Well, even beyond that, I want to ask, is it actually all that necessary for the two teams to be aligned or are you really separate worlds entirely? Cynthia: I mean, we are separated in many ways. However, we are touching very common user experiences. So for example, the core, the admin of the product. While I own the scope of the majority of it, there are still a lot of services that merchant services, the other organization, is responsible for bringing to life, and this does get introduced into core. So we do need to be very tightly aligned, but ideally loosely coupled. And this is why we have different leadership structures. There’s many ways we create, like, a centralized organization, like a centralized culture, centralized discipline, hiring practices. Leading The Discipline, Maintaining Coherence Cynthia: So this is through discipline work. So that was a role I used to have, which was leading the discipline of UX. Leading the discipline doesn’t mean everyone reports into you. It’s more like all of these horizontal tasks. So you can think of design, or UX ops, recruitment, hiring the big goals of the organization as well. What’s the makeup of the discipline? How many people? How should it grow? So now this is something that Andrea does. The discipline is horizontal, so we look at it across all the teams. However, the ownership of the user experience and, like, really how that transpires into the product, this is reporting into both of us basically. And the way we achieve unity or cohesiveness to a certain extent, well, first of all, we have a design system. So we have Polaris, who’s a open source design system. It’s, it’s a really good design system, actually. Peter: It’s one of the OG design systems. It’s been around forever. Cynthia: It’s one of the OG ones, yes, yes. But it’s still very well maintained. We’re at v12, that was just released, not too long ago. So the design system is one of the way that we achieve like some sort of alignment. But overall we have design principles, we have design values, and really we work with each other as much as possible. Like this whole idea of like providing a lot of feedback, getting really involved, not being afraid of going into details as well, is definitely one of the tools that we utilize to make sure the experience just works together. The whole principle of, like, not shipping the org chart is very important to us, and our merchants are using our admin without any understanding that the organization might be organized a certain way or not. So it’s very important for us not to let that bleed through. Jesse: You know, when I hear stories about these kind of horizontal leadership models where, and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but, a case where people are driving outcomes across teams that don’t report to them… Cynthia: mm hmm. Jesse: …and they are, attempting to influence the organization on a broader scale than the reporting structure itself actually provides or allows. And what I hear from folks in a lot of these cases is that this is a recipe for frustration, disappointment, and disempowerment. And so I wonder. If it’s working for you guys, what do you think is making it work here? Cynthia: Yeah I mean it requires a few things but first and foremost like it’s a set of tradeoffs. Like there’s no magic answers. You could have everyone report into a single person, and that would be good for certain things but really bad for other things, such as the decoupling of decision making, or it is impossible for any one person to have context on every single piece of the organization of the product. Really, the product is really complex, but also, like, I fundamentally believe that different organization makes decisions differently. But that’s a feature, not a bug. We want the growth team to be a little bit more gutsy. We want the growth team to be more aggressive with the features that they’re willing to test out. And at the same time, we want and we need the core team to be a little bit more resistant to creating a lot of quick iteration. We want it to be more foundational. And that is also part of how we achieve good results. So to me, like this is a trade off that we are making, but one that works for us. I have been in this situation before where I had, like, to influence without the authority, which is what you’re referring to. And yes, there are pieces that can be frustrating, but like, I think I’m an eternal optimistic. Like, I, I can recognize that something can be frustrating without being frustrated about it. And this is what I try to tell people as well, that like, hey, the disempowerment that someone might feel is actually just a misreading of the priorities, because in the end, our CEO actually really, really believes in the importance of UX as a discipline. Like I don’t need to sit down in a room with Tobi and explain like, “Oh no, UX is important, Tobi, please remember that it needs to exist.” We don’t have to fight for that. It’s a given. It’s actually like our CEO has to remind us sometimes like, “Hey, fight for yourself,” because we don’t have to do it naturally. And because Shopify doesn’t have to fight for UX most leaders that have grown at Shopify were not selected because of their ability to fight for UX, if that makes sense. So. I mean, we do have the classical executive sponsorship, so this is not something that at the discipline level you need to convince up and down. It’s just about convincing down and bringing people together. And then when you are that person that is trying to create that cohesive experience or culture, of course, like some people are motivated to ship their thing and you might get in the way of doing that. So there’s a lot of negotiation, there’s a lot of conversation that needs to happen, relationship building as well, like only through trust can you achieve anything really when you don’t have authority. But I operate from a place of, you know, I have a trust bank and then sometimes I need to make withdrawals, and sometimes I put back trust in the bank, and this is how I achieve anything basically. Accountability for UX Peter: I’m curious how you are held accountable as the head of UX for core products. Like does your boss have a set of things that are expected of you, to deliver outcomes, impact, anything like that, that is somehow specific to UX separate from the work of the product team. Cynthia: Yes, the answer is absolutely yes. My boss, my manager, Glenn, basically leads core, will absolutely come to me if an experience is broken, if something is suboptimal, if something is not as good as it should be, if there is a visual bug, but sometimes other types of bugs as well. So I think it’s hard to really define precisely what my role is. Like, we always say, like, aim, achieve and assemble is the framework we use, but I don’t think it does a great job of explaining everything that I’m expected to do. But mainly, I could not do anything about the discipline. As long as I have the right impact on the quality of the user experience, I’m doing my job at Shopify. Like we are very product-impact-driven and, like, what that means for me is ensuring that our product gets better every day. If I do this, I do my job. Everything else are tools that I set for myself to achieve that role better. So my boss doesn’t care about what culture I’m creating on the team. My boss does not care about what tool I’m putting in place, or systems or processes or any of that, as long as I have the right incentive structures in place for my team so that we achieve great UX. That’s all that he cares about, but he certainly cares about it and will hold me accountable for the quality of the UX, of anything shipping under my scope and sometimes outside of my scope as well, as he rightfully should. So if something ships from a different team that happens to touch a surface area that I own, and I didn’t pay close enough attention, I wasn’t curious enough, I didn’t get involved enough, that is on me, because in the end, our merchant don’t care. If I’m the boss or not, like they are using a page and if it doesn’t work appropriately, I don’t get to say it’s not my fault, it’s this other team. That’s something that we really don’t ever want to say at Shopify. The Trust Bank Jesse: So this shift into taking more responsibility for the outcomes was a natural result of your moving from a position of influence without authority to a position of authority, and you mentioned that when you were trying to wield that influence without authority, it all relied on what you described as the trust bank. And I love that that metaphor for it. You know, a lot of leaders, as they are moving into these executive levels for the first time, they might not have a trust bank to work with yet. And I’m curious about, now that you’re in this role where you do have the authority, how does the trust bank still play into how you do your job, and how can someone who’s stepping into that role go about building that trust bank for themselves? Cynthia: I really like that question, because it is unfair for me to assume that everyone has been at a company for 10 years. And I have, I’ve grown and I’ve been in every position, so I have a really good idea of, like, the context and the people and the organization, and it’s not true that everyone comes in with that, so that’s actually a great question. Trust plays a role that people misunderstand sometimes. They believe that the exchange currency between an employee and a manager is money. But really, that’s not the case. Money is a currency between the company, the employer, and the employee. A manager, an employee, the only currency is trust. And if I want my team to achieve anything, I cannot just use authority because they can choose to not listen to me and that’s it. It’s about trust. It’s trusting that I will say the thing and if they achieve the thing that I have said, they will be properly rewarded for that thing. It’s believing that the thing I say is closer to the end result than if I didn’t say that thing. It’s trusting that I understand enough about the craft that I’m not going to send them in a crazy goose chase, trying to find solutions that don’t exist. So that’s a trust that I need to build even with people that are reporting to me. Trust is multiple things and you don’t just have it by magic. It’s three things. So, it’s interpersonal trust, it’s disposable trust, and institutional trust. So disposable trust is, as a person, how likely am I to trust? This can be influenced by like, have I been scammed in the past? Were my parents trustworthy? So this is very individual. This is hard to influence. And you have to recognize that you are interacting with people. They have their own ability to trust, and this is something that is hard to navigate. However, if you know that you’re with someone that is less likely to trust, you just need to build a lot more trusting moment, because trust is built. In order to build trust, you go through interpersonal trust. And that is basically, like, how credible are you? How knowledgeable are you? How likely are you to do the thing that you said you were gonna do? Do you have a lot of experience achieving the thing you said you were going to do? So, if I need to do something with someone that I know is not trustworthy, I will say a lot of small steps, like I will say a thing and then do the thing. And then I will request for them to do the same thing. And this builds mutual trust together, until we are in that stage of like, they know they can trust me. I know we have to create smaller trust steps, if that makes sense, instead of just pointing at the mountain over there. There’s also institutional trust, and that is really hard, because the institution is really anything that is supporting the trust relationship. So that can be the organization, the company, but it can also be like the banking system, or technology, or the stock exchange, you know? It’s all of these institutions that are underlying the trust relationship. And again, this is really hard to build on that trust. But if the person doesn’t trust the institution, if I have an employee that doesn’t trust Shopify, there’s very little that I can do as a manager to change their mind. I can try to explain better certain strategies. I can try to involve them as much as I can so that they understand where things come from. But aside from that, that’s the best I can do. If they don’t trust it, there’s very little I can do. If they work for a tech company and they’re like, actually tech is going to crash, oh, I can instill a certain amount of optimism, but in the end, like that’s going to be very difficult. So I would say for someone that just joins an organization, they have to look at like the interpersonal trust level and do as much as they can in that layer. So showing that you’re credible, showing your experience, relying on that experience, and then setting a lot of small steps saying you’re going to do a thing and then doing that thing, whether that’s this afternoon, I will send you an update, send that update and like create a lot of opportunities for trust building. Peter: It’s clear you’re leaning quite heavily into the concept of trust as part of your leadership. And I’m, I have a few questions around it. This framework of, was it disposable trust? Was that the first one? Did I hear that… Cynthia: DIsposable trust, just [like] disposable income. You have disposable trust as well. Peter: Okay, so disposable trust, interpersonal trust, institutional trust. Is that a framework you developed or is that something you learned somewhere? How did you hit upon those three trusts? Cynthia: This is a real framework, however I’m explaining it and I’ve reused it in leadership, in the concept of leadership for many years at this point. So I cannot go back to the actual study that actually points, but there’s a real trust model. It’s also very, very Important in e-commerce and like, this is my business, but like, we’re building a trust relationship between, like, a buyer and a merchant. And basically buying online is a trust action. I expect that in exchange for, like, fake money, literally, like I’m sending a number and that’s gonna be money, hopefully everyone understands that money, that I’m going to get an object in exchange that is worth the same amount of money. And then merchant is like, I’m hoping that the numbers that are sent and written in a form are reliable and I’m going to get money in exchange of this thing and I’m going to send that back. So it’s a trust relationship that we both agree the value of the exchange is the same. And lean in a lot on the trust model there, because in the end, like our goal is to make sure merchants can build a lot of trust with their buyers. So everything we do there, like helping them have better product picture is about building trust. Helping them have a professional website is about building trust. Helping them create better content is about building trust. It’s all about it, basically. Peter: And then, so you, drew from and then have developed this framework for trust in your practice. I’m wondering if you have tools to help you understand how to manage your trust relationships with others, like documents where you’re writing down, like, trust, trust quotients and stuff… Cynthia: 74%. Peter: …or, or if this is, or if you used to have tools and now it’s something that’s just like a muscle memory that you’ve developed and you don’t need to be as intentional, or do you actually have, I’m thinking about it on behalf of the other leaders who are listening to this, like, like, is this something that, like, there’s worksheets to help kind of scaffold your way through this, or is this just something that it’s just kind of how you engage with these things kind of rattling around. Cynthia: So it’s definitely not, I don’t have like a worksheet with everyone’s name on it and I’m like, oh, this person trusts me or does not trust me and therefore I will like tune in to like how long or how often I send in updates or like whatever. I don’t have that. I do like at one point intuit it from my interactions with people. However, I do find myself using it and even explicitly when someone starts reporting into me and like, hey, I’m your lead, I’m really hoping we get to build a horizontal relationship, not a vertical one, where like, we are both as valuable, we just happen to have different responsibilities, but in order for that to happen, we have to recognize that I will know things sometimes that I don’t get to tell you, and trust me that I will tell you the things whenever I can, and if I can’t, it’s because I have a good reason for it, I’m not like trying to play with you or anything. I’m not playing like a power move or anything. So I will use and say, like, trust me that this will happen. And whenever it happens, I reinforce it. Like, hey, see what just happened. We had to announce this thing. You see, I could not tell you that information. I wish I could have, but I could not because of that reason, and that reason, and that reason. If it would have been legal for me to share that information, I would have. Or if it would not have created an external risk, I would have shared it with you. So I also share, like, very explicitly the reasons that have led me to maybe make a small break in trust at that moment, or use it to explain my rationale and hopefully increase trust with that person. So I definitely am very, very explicit about it. But I don’t really have a worksheet. I will, though, like, create a lot of, like, systems to support it. So I die by my calendar. Like my calendar is like literally my life, but I’m very intentional about designing it in a way that supports it. So if I say like we’ll have a one on one every other week and I never cancel it unless you want to cancel it. Well, I do that and I make sure my calendar is up to date and like it has designed that time in so I’m very very intentional about how I use that time and making time for trust building moment is super important for me. So trust building moments are, yes, one on ones, but also like separating one on one and product review is very important to me because one on ones will talk about you and me. Product reviews will talk about product, and then you get to invite whoever you want. And you get, as a leader reporting to me, to use that time to build trust with your own team, that you will bring them and create visibility with me. So, I don’t have like a worksheet or anything, but I certainly introduce processes to make sure I stand by the things that I say. Peter: You’re very intentional in your practice, even if you’re not, writing it all down in a spreadsheet somewhere. Cynthia: I don’t look like it. I’m very casual, but I’m also very intentional. Yeah. Jesse: So I love this concept of institutional trust, and I can totally see how that plays out among your design team in terms of making sure that they feel like they trust where the business is going. They trust, you know, all of it. I noticed that there is also an exercise in institutional trust building that design leaders often have to take on, which is not team facing, but which is rather about building institutional trust in design itself across the other functions of the organization and getting people to believe in the power of design, the value proposition of design. What has your experience been building institutional trust in design as a function over the course of your journey? The “Seat at the Table” Cynthia: I’m very I would say lucky because I recognize that not all organizations start from a place of like caring about UX, and, like, our organization very much cares about it, as I shared before, so I recognize that this is not everyone’s experience. However, I always say that don’t beg for a seat at the table and like I always do like the big air quotes like “seat at the table.” I, I don’t love talking about seat at the table because really like the only thing that I have seen working is merit. As in, like, if you want to be invited, you will be if people believe that you’re valuable to the organization. And if you are not valuable to the organization, you will be dropped out of the invite, even by mistake sometimes, and then no one will notice that you’ve been missing. So, I’ve found that providing value to the organization and placing the organization first is the best way to come from a place of strength. So whenever I am sitting at the metaphorical table, I’m not representing design like, you know, the UN each representatives represents their country. I’m not, I’m sitting at the table trying to achieve the best outcome for Shopify. And sometimes it’s, it’s not in UX’s best interest, most of the time it is, because I believe that, like, the incentives and what UX is trying to achieve is 100 percent aligned with the best interests of both the users and the organization. But sometimes there is, well, we need to defund certain things, or we need to share our resources, or we might need to kill certain initiatives. Might not always be the discipline’s favorite thing to say, but you can’t just come in and fight for UX and think that nothing else matter, and it’s just like, Oh, it’s UX, UX, UX. And like, let’s fund it more, more, more, more, more. Like it’s an organization. I’m working for a company and if I wanted to work for a nonprofit, I could, like, I’m choosing right now to work for a company whose mission I care about. I care about deeply, but I also recognize that the vehicle of that organization is a company and therefore, like, making profit. So as long as I’m at peace with this, I know that the vast majority of the time it is really well aligned. But whenever I’m sitting at that table, I put my Shopify hat. I don’t put my discipline hat. Now in one on one conversations, that’s different. When I’m meeting with the person that leads engineering, for example, well, I do need to explain certain point of views to make sure that disciplines that are more numerous than my own don’t simply forget or like in French, we say “far from the eyes, far from the heart.” So when you don’t see something, you stop loving the thing. My role is to to prevent that from happening and to advocate for the value of it whenever the value is real. It’s not to create fake value around something and I’ve seen and heard a lot of discipline leader that were fighting for their discipline at any cost. And I just don’t believe in that approach. I just believe, like, provide value to the organization, understand the business in which you are, and then you’ll be invited at the table. Jesse: I think that a lot of these design leaders who feel the need to fight for UX all the time, if you ask them why they are doing that, they would say it’s because the organization is leaving unrealized value on the table, that an evolution of their design processes, just deploying the people that they already have in different ways, can help them realize that value. And they see it as their role as design leaders to advocate for that unrealized value, to try to grow the value that the design team is delivering. And I wonder, you know, where do you draw that line? Where is it worth it to fight for the thing that the executives don’t see the value of yet? Cynthia: There’s legitimate cases of fighting and like, I tried to pick my battles. Like, I stand firmly that no dark pattern will ever see the light of day for as long as I work at Shopify, whether that dark pattern would come from my team or from another team. This is a battle that I’m willing to fight. I will pick that fight every single time. And thankfully it’s not a fight I have to fight very often, so I’m pretty glad. Peter: [patterns] gets right at the heart of trust that like what you were talking [before]. Cynthia: It does, it does. And it only takes a user being scammed once for them to never, ever use your platform again. When we’re talking about e-commerce, if one merchant scams a customer, that customer will stop buying, not from that merchant, from all merchants. That sort of feels the same. Like this is unrealized value, literal unrealized value. Like lifetime customer value is way more interesting when you look at it across all merchants than just like between one merchant and one customer. But that’s an aparté. Most fights aren’t worth it Cynthia: So there’s definitely some fights that are worth fighting for. I just I guess my criticism of some design leaders is that not every fight is worth fighting for. And we shouldn’t always show up as like, “Oh, poor us. Again, engineering didn’t understand that we really wanted to do wireframes.” And I’m like, no, they don’t understand. And that’s cool. We don’t understand their frameworks. And like, they’re not crying to the CEO about it. Like, they’re doing their thing not caring about us. So, like, I often refer to the little sister syndrome, family of four, I’m the youngest kid and I’ve always had like that “I wish I were 16 so I could drive.” “I wish I would be 18 so I could drink,” you know I always had like that little sister, I see what the other wants. The reality is like, you can complain, but you’re not going to get older faster, you know, like there’s nothing you can do about it. The UX team is never going to be more numerous than the engineering team So let’s stop that fight, you know, there’s always going to be a ratio, well, whether applied or not. But there’s always going to be more engineers than UXers. It’s not unfair; I actually don’t want to work for an organization that has more UXers than engineers. We would never get anything done. Like, nothing would ever get… So once you recognize why certain decisions are made, then those fights, drop those fights and pick the one that are actually valuable. And again, you can only win a fight if the other person trusts you. It comes back to this, but like, if you show up as an executive, you show up at putting the company first, not your discipline first. And when you’re approaching it from that way, the fights that you’re bringing to the table are by definition fights that are benefiting the organization, not just your discipline. Peter: How do you help your team, the 200 people that are in your organization, how do you help them understand what you just said, right, because they’re looking to you as the head of UX, so you are representing UX. They’re looking to you to provide inspiration and possibly creative direction, but you’re like, actually my job is to be an executive first, a UX leader second. How have you helped them understand the nature of your job? Modeling leadership Cynthia: I’m sure some will actually listen to this podcast and be like, hmm. I would say, I try to tell people and explain how this is benefiting them in the end because the reality is, like, I get a lot of leeway from the whole executive team because they know that I’m not like being ridiculous about my spends, for example, that I’m being very strict about how I do performance management, for example. They know that in advance, so I don’t get shit for it ever, you know, so I tried to represent the importance of that to the team. I’ve also been very careful about, again, representing UX as something that drives value to the organization, but not always measurable value. And this is something we don’t need to argue about. We don’t need to measure the value of making a design change. Like, we’re good. This only happens when people believe that you’re utilizing resources well. Else, they’ll start asking you like, okay, well you need to A/B test and prove me the value of every change you make. ‘Cause I don’t know if you’re using your resources well, and you have a pretty big budget. So if you want to maintain it, like show me impact, product impact. If instead I show up saying like, Hey, I’m going to be fairly conservative about how I use my resources, but trust me that I do it in the best way possible, that will drive as much value possible to the organization, then I get to make the call. If, hey, just a design overhaul might be worth it, we just won’t be able to measure it. Actually, we won’t measure it at all. We’re not even going to be able to do it. Just trust us that it’s better and it’s better for the experience. And it works, you know, we get to do those all the time and it’s great. So to people on my team, I tried to explain them that by having a seat at the table, which means acting as an executive, it creates a lot of leeway, creates a lot of flexibility and gives a lot of freedom to the team to really achieve their goals. But also I tried to be very, very transparent about these decisions as much as I can with people on my team. And of course, like it requires a certain amount of seniority to understand certain decisions. But I discuss a lot of financial literacy, like, Hey, we’re a public company, our numbers are out there. You should understand those numbers so that you understand the context in which certain decisions are made. And by sitting those decisions into reality, it really helps explaining certain decisions that might be harder to swallow sometimes. The intersection of business and design Peter: Your participation on this show was suggested by Andy Healy, someone that you used to work with. And he said in an email to Jesse and I, Cynthia has been a driving force at Shopify, encouraging all designers to think about the intersection of business and design, which I’m bringing it up because I felt like you were, you were getting… Cynthia: I’m glad he believes that! Peter: You were, you were, you were getting there. And so I’m wondering, when he’s mentioning this intersection of business and design, is that something you address explicitly? Do you have ways of talking about how design and business integrate, interact, intersect, whatever it is? And what are those ways? Cynthia: Funnily enough, no. Like, I rarely talk about the importance of UX for the business. Surprisingly. So it’s rare that I come back and say like, Oh, because we’ve made this uplift, like it has led to 33 percent more conversion on that page. However, when we have that data, sure. That’s a very fun thing to celebrate, to say like, Hey, really just this design uplift has led to higher conversion. That’s amazing. And I love those stories, but honestly, it’s pretty rare that this is how I approach it. I’ve done a few things directly to the whole team. When I was leading the discipline, I chose two big rocks one year. The big rocks are things we want to work on as an organization. And I was like, the first thing is everyone needs to have a test store. So everyone needs to have a store that is actually active, that you have a lot of things happening on. And the second thing is you have to improve either your technical proficiency, or financial literacy. And these are the only two things that I will talk about this year, and I will measure. We had like a survey bot sent to people and we were asking them like, what have you done this week to learn about something new? And we were looking at the results there. We gave some talks internally, but also we have a lot of very, very smart people at Shopify that can explain financial results in the most descriptive and interesting way. They’re basically like MBAs in 12-minute videos. I definitely ask people to watch those. I discuss those. I try to make as much noise as possible around it, because by definition, if you chose design, you probably weren’t going to go in business. There’s a little bit of a self-selection process that is happening there. And I’m like, hey, do as best as you can in the things that you’ve selected by definition, the default will be that you’ll continue doing this thing. You chose to do this as a career. You’re interested by it. You’re surrounded by people that will propulse you in that direction. So I kind of need to break that default a bit and say technical and business literacy is very important in the context that you are operating at. Peter: What proportion chose technical and what proportion chose business? Cynthia: Actually, the vast majority chose technical. Peter: That does not surprise me at all. Cynthia: But I’m not disappointed by that. ‘Cause I think it’s also like, If someone has another X thread of like, should designer learn to code? Like I might break down, like, I’m like, just should designer learn period? The answer is yes. Just learn. Learn about the other things. Why would we argue against this learning to code doesn’t make us any less important, valuable, necessary. No one says you should learn to code instead of being a good designer. That’s a little sister argument in my opinion that we should not learn to code. Learning is good. If you work for a tech company, learn about tech. That’s a good thing. Should designer learn about commerce if they work at Shopify? Yes, yes, they should. They should be very interested in commerce if they work at Shopify, that’s just basic in my opinion. And we want to hire people that have a growth mindset that are interested by learning that aren’t learned helplessness of like, oh, but I don’t know, so I won’t do it. It seems hard. That’s not what we want. That’s not the people we want to attract. So, yeah, I have no problem with people choosing to learn about our tech stack more. Jesse: I want to back up to something that you said earlier. You said that part of what you do is Recognizing that a situation can be frustrating without personally being frustrated. Cynthia: Frustrated, yeah. Jesse: And this touches on the notion of emotional resilience for leaders and your ability to ride it out when things get tough. And so I wonder, you know, how do you acknowledge the frustrating nature of the situation without getting frustrated yourself, and how do you maintain an even keel through all of this? Cynthia: I’m going to quote a, well, not quote, refer to a psychologist, I believe. I cannot remember their name. I just remember reading what they shared in at one point. And they were specifically talking to women in leadership positions. And I’m not, I will rarely talk about being a women in leadership or women in tech, because the reality is, like, UX has a very high proportion of women, like, we’re not in a situation where like there’s not enough women in UX. Like, it’s great. We have a lot of women, something that is amazing, but it’s not really like a fight that I feel, like, well-equipped to do because like more than half the team are made of women. So I’m not in the minority here. However, like in leadership positions, I’m very aware that there are certain traits that tends to be punished more when they come from women as to when they come from men. And this is having an emotional reaction to a situation When a man has an emotional situation, they are seen as vulnerable. Or the situation is bad enough that their emotion is warranted. When a woman has an emotional reaction, and i’m saying in general obviously, but these are facts, but it’s in general, when a woman has an emotional reaction to a situation, it is her that is the problem. Whether the situation warrants it or not, is not part of the message and the judgment. So that person said, instead of acting angry, say you are angry. Instead of acting out and, like, screaming, say, Hmm, this is very frustrating. And using the words will be enough for people to understand, because you don’t want to hide your emotion either. Like, that’s not the point of the thing. It’s not like pretend you have no emotion. I don’t think that’s a good way or human way of operating. I’m all for, like, emotions being shared, but saying the emotion is just as satisfying as it is to actually act the way that you feel, and is enough to actually operate some change and not get the punishment that comes with the emotion. When I read that, I thought it was actually super powerful and it was a good way for helping me navigate situations that can be very stressful, that can be very frustrating. But when it comes to, like, recognizing things can be frustrating without being frustrated about it, I think this is me, like, growing up. I’m fairly young still. And I know that I have things to learn. I’m still on this journey of, you know, growing up and being more mature and not having such a hot reaction to things that I think are not ideal, because I am very passionate and I care very, very much about how things are done. And like, if the things are not done in the most optimal way, it gets in the way. It’s frustrating to me. Like, these things really matter to me, so this is something that has just been a very helpful tool. Recognizing, like, hey, this is super frustrating, but am I actually frustrated about it? Like, will I think about that overnight, or is this just not ideal? Is it just like messing with my idea of how the thing should be working, or is it really frustrating and will have an emotional impact on me? It’s been very empowering. Jesse: Well that sounds wonderful and almost like a Buddhist monk or something in terms of your non-attachment that you’re practicing here. Yeah, but I wonder, you know, aren’t there days when you bring it home, right? Aren’t there sleepless nights for you, or are you really able to just let it all go? Cynthia: I mean, my husband works at Shopify, so like, bringing it home literally means like every day. I still get frustrated about things. I get angry at things, but I try to choose which one I really get angry about. Like, I get angry about the work being not good, the product not working well, or, like, when for organizational reasons, we got into a position that is bad or that is frustrating to the users. Like, these are the things that are frustrating to me. I get frustrated when there’s bad intent, when someone is just not operating from a place of like, just good intent, or like ego these are actually frustrating to me. I’ll get angry at that, but again, choosing what I get angry about makes my anger spur a lot more powerful… Jesse: mmmm… Cynthia: Anyone that is using anger is using it as a tool, whether you realize it or not, you’re trying to convey a certain message by reacting with anger when like, in the work environment, let me be very clear, I’m talking about work here, like, not in your personal emotional relationship, but at work, if you’re choosing anger, it’s that you are trying to convey a message. That the thing the person is saying is not the right one, you believe it’s the wrong one, or like, whatever. So choosing anger as a way to convey a message is actually very powerful when you’re not always angry. When you’re always angry, then people dismiss your anger for being just like, you’re just someone that reacts a lot. So yeah, I’ve tried to turn it more into like a leadership tool and a communication tool, like designing the communication basically, Jesse: Mm hmm. Pragmatism Peter: One thing I’m picking up on is a strongly pragmatic orientation. Cynthia: Yeah. I tend to be that. Peter: I’m wondering if, if pragmatism is just kind of who you are and how you approach things, or if pragmatism is something you’ve had to learn on your journey. Cynthia: I mean, surprisingly, I was a creative kid, you know, like I, I was in arts and stuff like that, but I think I’ve always been extremely pragmatic, and this is something that serves me well in the industry because there’s also a lot of less pragmatic types that become very creative and very good at what they do and they’re super talented, and their lack of pragmatism creates a lot of creativity as well, and I value that immensely, I really really value that piece. I love people that are extremely ambitious, but also like delusional about their ambition because I tend to be more pragmatic and risk averse, yet I have great ambitions. I think that design as a whole is made of a wide range of personalities. A lot of people are more creative types, and leading with pragmatism actually contains people in a certain way. My hope is that I don’t restrain people, I just contain so that they can be very free inside of that container. But I mean, I’m not going to hide it. I’m a very pragmatic person, but again, I’m very fun. I insist. Jesse: Well, I wonder, fun notwithstanding, I wonder what the role of idealism is as you see it in the midst of all of this pragmatism, because I think that for a lot of design leaders, what you’re saying is breaking their hearts right now, because they see themselves as champions for an ideal, for a higher standard of service to humans and of creative practice and of all of these things that they are fighting, fighting, fighting to try to bring that ideal to life into reality for them. If you’re not doing that, where does the idealism come into play in how you do your job? Cynthia: My pragmatism and realism is that I am making the world a better place through design, that I’m using my design skills to improve the human race. Really fundamentally believe that I literally wrote a book about it. This is how much I care about it. I fundamentally believe that creativity is a business tool. So I just happen to have a pragmatic view of idealism, if that makes sense. I happen to be very, very aligned with the values that comes from the design industry, that comes from helping the human, that comes from the fluffy stuff, like the fluffy things that people, like, struggle talking about, because it’s just about being nice. I just see the value of being nice. I very much see it. And this is why I put it into frameworks, because this allows me to use that tool without falling into this place of being unable to discuss the other things as well, and making enough room for the other things that I need to have in my role, while fostering and caring and being present and wanting people to be creative and to do funky and fun and different things and fostering it. So my pragmatism is actually tied to the fact that amazing design is good and is actually helping humans. And that I always say, like, I strive to be kind, not nice. And again, that comes from a place of pragmatism, because I see being nice as getting in a way of achieving great things. I see being kind as a way to achieve everything. Jesse: Mm hmm. Peter: I want to continue this. So I am, I’m a pragmatist as well. And the risk of pragmatism as a leader is… Cynthia: mm-hmm Peter: …accommodation, right? There’s some dominant way of behaving that, practicing your realpolitik, you are going to accommodate to whatever that dominant way of behaving is. And then you’re essentially acceding to it, as opposed to, we were talking about fighting, maybe fighting isn’t the right word, but advocating for what you know to be the potential. And so I’m curious, what your vision is of the potential for change, right? Most design leaders have some vision of the change they want to realize. And I’m curious how you think about that, how you approach that, ’cause you’re probably not satisfied with things at Shopify; however good they are, they could be better. So what is, what is it you’re trying to drive people toward? Cynthia: Yeah, I think, like, I’m not a peacemaker. So, my role is not to accommodate everyone, to make progress. I– We’re analyzing very deeply everything right now. Jesse: Welcome to the show. Cynthia: Yeah, I know. That’s great. But my role is not to accommodate, and my role is to definitely fight the right fights. I am very thankful for the leadership team that I have and my boss as well, where if I go to my boss, I’m like, Hey, this doesn’t work and requires more work or requires more resources. I’m blocking this. I might get pushed back, we might have a discussion, we might have disagreement about it, but in general, there’s huge trust that if I say like, hey, this is bad enough that it needs to be unshipped, or it needs to be delayed before we ship it, or even if it increases conversion, I believe it should be pulled down, or like, hey, I know the tests were positive, but I believe it has second order effects that might be bad. All of these things are totally respected, and appropriate. And this is my role to have those conversations. It is my role to make sure that UX is not defunded because I believe that it has to be right-sized to achieve its goal. So it’s not about accommodation. It’s not about just peacemaking and being always the one that takes the hit just so that no one gets mad. My vision for UX requires tension. So it needs engineering, UX, and product to have like the right amount of tension. And if UX is the one that keeps folding, the two other pieces will fall over it. Like I want to hold that tension. And I think I do very seriously, but I don’t want to pull too hard on that string so that it breaks that filament at all. Does that make sense? Peter: It does. I’m, I’m wondering what, if any, agenda you have, like, what is Cynthia trying to advance within this context? Cynthia: I ultimately just really care about the quality of the design in the product. So everything that gets in the way of that, I will fight for. I care very much about someone using our product and feeling empowerment through it. I care that our employees see the value that they create in the world. And I always say, you could be working at any companies you want in tech, at a certain level, like you could go to a different company. I personally, like, chose to become a designer because I wanted to use my brain, my creativity, and what I’m able to do, like my ability to shape things in order to improve the life of the person that I’m designing for. And as long as I work for a company who’s a hundred percent aligned with that, I’m good to go. Designing is about, like, changing a person’s behavior. You’re trying to make them do something. As long as I’m using my brain to make them do something that benefits them and someone else along the way, and if Shopify makes money along the way and I make money then, like, we’re good to go. I want these to be in perfect alignment. I never want to shape a certain behavior that is actually not in the person’s best interest, but in the organization best interest or in another user’s best interest. So i’m not taking a stab at any company in particular. But if the majority of what you do is, for example, creating advertisement opportunities, you are trying to shape behaviors to create more advertisement opportunities. Then the user’s best interest is not aligned with the second user for which you are actually designing for. This is what I care about. This is why I became a designer. This is why I want my design team to continue working for and working really hard. And that’s the goal that I want our team to not just do, but feel like they’re doing. I want them to know that their design is in the best interest of literally everyone that it touches. Peter: How have you shared that vision with the team? Does the team know this about you? Cynthia: That’s a good question. I think the majority knows that I care about these things. We do have, like, conversations. We do have internal conferences. This is something I share when I’m interviewing as well. It’s a very common question that people ask, why do you still work at Shopify? Like, yeah, money’s good, but I mean, I could have good money elsewhere, you know, and specifically a few years ago, it would have been very easy to just like seek a different paycheck. And this is what I tell people, I choose Shopify because it continues to be the place where the mission is the most aligned with my personal values and where everything I get to do gets to benefit everyone along the chain. I don’t think that’s the most accurate way of sharing that message to be fair. That’s something I might want to share a bit more. I thank you for the idea. Jesse: Cynthia, what are you looking forward to right now? Cynthia: Oh, great question. There’s a lot of super interesting projects that are about to ship and like, honestly, I know that’s a cheesy answer, but there are certain projects that have been so frustrating for a while because you just want them to ship for so long. And like every time I would use a product, I’d be like, Hmm, is it just me? Or is that complicated? Am I being dense or is this thing being dense, you know? And for so many reasons, sometimes honestly, just resource limitations at one point, or like optimization, it never gets fixed. And some of these are about to ship and they’re big changes. And this is super exciting to me. I’m looking forward to the peace era in technology, if I may. Right now, we’ve just come out of a crazy stage of like, things are all like 10x-ing and it’s like super exciting, super exciting, super exciting, but like any bubble burst at one point, and we’re seeing that pop right now in the industry, unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve gone through 2022 and seen what has happened. This, of course, has been very difficult for people involved, for employees, for everyone that is, this is very challenging for them, and it does impact your emotions and how you live and, like, your family life. Like, it’s very difficult. I’m looking forward to being on the other side of this and being in a more stable, trustworthy environment. And I believe the best creative work comes from a place of people having creative courage. And to have creative courage, you have to have a sense of footing. You have to feel secure to put yourself out there and do super creative work. So this is definitely like the era. I call it the peace era that I’m looking for. I’m looking forward to my kids that are growing up and are very, very exciting to watch. I’m excited about the general shape of Shopify right now. Like it’s, it’s fun. When people that are starting to work at Shopify ask me why I want to still work at Shopify, I answer because it’s value-aligned. And when people at Shopify ask me, like, why are you still here? It’s because I still believe that I have more fun at Shopify than I would have anywhere else. And until I feel like that’s no longer the case, I’ll stay at Shopify and have that fun. Jesse: Fantastic. Cynthia, thank you so much. Cynthia: Thank you so much. Peter: This has been excellent. Thank you. Jesse: Cynthia, if people want to find you on the internet, how can they do that? Cynthia: My very poor LinkedIn profile. You can find my book, tragicdesign.com. It’s currently on sale on Amazon, by the way. It’s still very relevant. I’m at conferences. You can find me on YouTube, but I don’t have a personal website. Jesse: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Cynthia: Thank you. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript What follows is a lightly edited transcript produced by our podcast software. It may retain some textual glitchiness. Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show, “mission critical” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re the Chief Experience Officer for the United States Air Force. The first person to take on that role, Colt Whittall, joins us to talk about getting things done when you have more influence than authority, finding meaning and purpose in government service, and taking risks in an environment where failure is not an option. Peter: So Colt, what I’m curious about is, I think this is a new role, right? This role didn’t exist before. I don’t know if it was created for you or if someone had the idea and then found you. But why were you the right person to be the first Chief Experience Officer at the Air Force? Colt: So, great question. First of all, yes, this was a brand new role. Well, let me just tell you how it was created, and then we’ll talk about, why was I picked to do it? So it was, it was really created because the Air Force knew we had a user experience problem, primarily with IT but also with software. We had a lot of complaints. And this has been going on for years, and I think there was a general sense that maybe things were getting worse and not better. And so the CIO at the time knew he had an issue. He also had an understanding of the importance of software, which, the CIO role is a little different in DoD, their control of enterprise IT is fairly direct, but their control of applications is less direct as in a corporate environment. There’s generally control of those that’s spread out amongst a bunch of different organizations. He knew he had an issue. He had some authority over it and wanted to create this role. Then why me? I came out of about a 20, 25 year career in the digital agency space, digital consultancies. I was at Deloitte in the nineties, built one website after another and mobile app and so on from. 2000 to 2018 with a digital agency that we spun out of Deloitte and did a lot of fantastic work in a variety of industries, media, health care, wellness, travel, hospitality, financial services, and some federal government. And Bill Marion, the CIO, had been a client of mine at one point. And so I had a, probably a fairly typical background for people that listen to your podcast, right? A mix of digital strategy and user experience and customer experience. And by 2018, I was at the equity partner level, practice lead kind of level. And we sold the company and we were looking to get out. And so that’s what I did. And took a little time off. I had always had an interest in federal government and user experience and technology in the federal government. And when I was in graduate school I pursued it a couple of different ways and kind of built on that. Did internships in DC. One of them had to do with high definition television. I worked on the high definition television project for AT&T, interacted a lot with their government affairs group with Bell Labs up in Summit Hill, New Jersey. And then I did an internship with the FCC. It was set up by my thesis advisor, who’s named Dale Hatfield. And worked on the first ever narrowband PCS auctions. This whole idea of the intersection of technology and government’s always been a big passion of mine. And so after a career in the digital agency space , I happen to know some people in government. I approached Bill Marion, Bill Marion had a problem. He knew me, didn’t know a lot about me, but he, he knew enough about me. That on LinkedIn , I basically just said, “Hey, Bill, I’m thinking about going to work for the government for a while.” In my mind, I’m thinking US Digital Services or something like that, which you may have heard of. I wanted to talk to Bill because I knew him and I need a little advice. Like, how would I even go about this? , I don’t want to just go looking for, jobs on USA Jobs and just start submitting resumes. I’m like, there has to be a better way. And Bill responds on LinkedIn five minutes later, says, “meet me at the Pentagon on Tuesday.” That’s literally what he said. And I flew up and I met with Bill and we started talking about the challenge of user experience and performance across IT and the Air Force. And I think we began to formulate what this role could look like and that’s really it. Most of my background, as you just heard, is more in the software and application, and more consumer and outward facing. However, a lot of the tools we need to fix our problem internally for airmen– which is what I focus on, I barely touch the external facing web stuff at all– but a lot of the same tools apply internally for the applications and systems and IT that airman use. The Scope of the Chief Experience Officer Jesse: So I think it might be a little challenging for folks to conceptualize what those needs might be inside the Air Force. Why you would need a chief experience officer. I would love to hear a little bit about, to the extent that you can without committing treason, the communities that you serve, a little bit the broad use cases that you’ve served just to get a sense of the scope of the challenge that you’re really talking about here. Colt: Sure. The scope is huge. I mean, first of all, think about all the missions that we do, right? You know, first of all, we’re the, air force and the space force. Jesse: Right. Colt: Delta Airlines has, I want to say eight or 900 planes. We have over 6, 000. All right. So it’s huge. And we have a vastly wider range of aircraft, right? Both fixed wing, rotor, drone, all of it. Right. Plus we have the space force. We fly satellites. We work with contractors that launch us into space. We do all of that. Right. Then we have land base missiles. We have air defense type stuff and radar installations of all types. All of that it, all of those systems have an IT component to it. All of them, right? Just one, for example, we’re replacing the Minuteman missiles that sit in ground based silos. It’s a program called Sentinel. That will have big deadlines coming up over the next few years because we have certain timelines that we have to hit. But there are 10, 20, I don’t even know what the latest number is, there’s a number of systems that support all of that. Everything from the logistics to the control, to all of it, right? All of that has to be designed and built. So we have, you know, I was talking with the CTO of a major, well, I’ll just say it was Coca-Cola, several years ago, and he was telling me about the number of systems they have. First of all, they have more than I would have thought or a global organization, right? I thought there’s a lot of duplication, right? They’ve acquired a lot of companies over the years. Yada, yada, yada. We have many, many times more than that, right. Jesse: Mm Colt: It’s a big complex. Okay. Now, so you got all these we have, let’s call it 700,000 total airman contractor. That’s active duty guard, reserve, civilian, and contractors that are like on our networks in our systems. Call it 700,000 plus or minus. And they are interacting with, call it, there’s maybe 40 systems that have more than 50,000 accounts, quite a few of those over 500,000 accounts. And then there’s this long tail of systems that go all the way out to very tactical things, some of which are extremely mission important, that might only have a few dozen or a few hundred accounts, right. And they’re doing everything imaginable, right? They’re flying satellites, they’re handling logistics, all of it, right? They’re putting together schedules of flights and sorties and getting fuel on planes and recording the hours of pilots and crews and making sure it’s scheduling of all of the above. And then you’ve got really mundane things like getting people paid on time and dealing with health care and booking their flights. It’s everything that a typical large organization does, plus all of these other long tail of missions. And then on top of that, just to make it even more complicated, we are literally around the world and supporting a lot of hardware out there. Across Levels of Security Colt: And then we’re doing it at multiple different information security levels, which if you’ve never dealt with information security in this kind of an organization, it gets a little crazy, right? Because you’ve got completely public information, right? Then there’s unclassified and essentially public, like the public could have it. And then there’s controlled unclassified information, which is just things that aren’t publicly releasable, but they’re not classified. And then there’s secret, top secret, and various flavors and things above that, So, it’s a complicated environment. And these systems, think about it, some live at one level, some live at another level, some live at the other level. So it, it is a complex environment. It’s not unique to the air force and space force, right? This is across all of DoD. Developing an Agenda Peter: Given this complexity, I would imagine a big challenge in your role is maintaining focus, figuring out what, what to work on. And I’m wondering, when you joined and then maybe over your time there, something that we heard from prior heads of design was the importance of some vision. Not necessarily destination, but generally a direction they were trying to move things towards. And I’m wondering, did you have something like that when you joined? Or what did it take for you, because it sounds like this was probably a new environment, to realize this is what I’m here to do. This is my personal North Star. And then how did that help you make sense of this complexity, where it would be very easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you could do, and you needed to focus on the things that actually advanced your agenda toward that vision. Colt: So we definitely have a vision now. But it took a little while to evolve. It’s not that the vision evolved. The way that I talk about it got clearer and clearer. And it can probably be clearer still. When I took this role it was June of 2019 and like any kind of incoming executive, I kind of set the expectation there was going to be about a 90 day sort of study transition kind of plan, and then I’ll come back with an approach. And the good news is, after that meeting at the Pentagon with Bill, I had about six months while they were creating the job, and I had a pretty good idea that I was going to get the job. So I had a lot of time to prepare. And it was a little bit my sabbatical, or you know, I call it my gap year. So I had a lot of time to prep. So I came in with a lot of preparation. Then I had my 90 day transition. I booked a lot of plane tickets. I visited a lot of places. I talked to a million people. I looked at a lot of data. I’m a career professional consultant. So I came back with a nice, big, thick document. And I thought it was very well- structured and clear. And , like a good senior executive in the federal government, my boss said, “Love it. On board. This is exactly what you need to do, but it’d be better if you could put it in a placemat.” And I’m like, okay, can do. Put it in a placemat. And did a lot of talks and you can actually go out and you can go on YouTube and you can actually find videos of me presenting my placemat in public events and the placemat was helpful, but it wasn’t clear enough. Colt: And so not long after that, people were asking me, Colt, okay, love the placemat, but what’s our strategy? And we needed something that applied to both enterprise IT and software that people can understand very quickly. And so essentially the strategy is, we’re going to treat airmen like they’re customers. Which is a big shift in mentality in a government organization. So we’re gonna treat our airmen like they’re customers. As if we’re a major IT services company, like a Microsoft or Google or somebody else, right? And so we treat airmen like customers, and then we’re going to measure the experience from their perspective. And then we’re going to track that over time, figure out how to make it better and manage service levels. Fundamentally, that’s a strategy. So it’s an outside-in type of user-centric approach focused heavily on measuring experience, because that’s something that we can do at scale. I mean, think about the scale of the organization I described earlier. I can’t think of another way to do it. Well, there’s many challenges with user experience, but one of the challenges with user experience is, at the end of the day, it improves system by system, application by application, user journey by user journey. And so we needed a way to kind of say, okay, how do we go set the bar, measure the bar, figure out where the bar is, and then start trying to get the entire culture to move the bar up. We needed a clearer, more succinct strategy and that’s when I got down to, okay, here, the strategy is fairly concise: treat airmen like customers, as if we are basically a big IT services company, and measure user experience from their perspective as they’re doing the mission. There’s implications to all those things, and then track it over time and manage service levels, you know, to improve them. And that is fundamentally the strategy. People seem to be able to understand that very easily at all levels. I talked to general officers, totally get that because they apply similar techniques everywhere. You know, the organization understands all aspects of that. They understand about measuring service levels and managing service levels. Once you start putting user experience into those terms, an organization as big as with these kinds of missions can grab on to it and say, yeah, that’s a good way to do it. Jesse: This is fascinating because it feels like such a shift for you, away from consulting work, which I know that you’ve done for many years. And I’m curious because it feels like there’s an element of consulting, which is about get in, make the strategic impact, get out and move on to the next thing. And this is about, getting in and going deeper and deeper and deeper and getting sort of more into it. And I wonder, what was attractive to you about the shift to this context? And what did you discover when you actually got to the other side? Colt: You know, you’re right. Career professional consultant going from project to project. And we had a very good run. I mean, I was with essentially the same organization the entire time, right? I was with Deloitte, we spun a company out, we sold it so I was essentially with one organization the whole time. But never really got to see a lot through in the way of our client work. I even had accounts for years, one account 7, 8 years, so saw a lot of things through, but not like this. So my goal was, let’s see if we can move the needle in a massive way for an organization this big. And I was fairly convinced that we could, but that was what was really attractive to me is, let’s attempt to measure user experience in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to airmen doing the mission, and their mission. And then let’s track it over time. And then let’s figure out what levers we need to pull in order to move the metrics and deliver a better service level. And have everybody agreed that we did it. I mean, fundamentally, that was what I wanted to do. That’s what attracted me to doing this. And I went in fairly convinced that we could do it. I didn’t know exactly how we were going to do it. But I had a lot of ideas on how we could do it. But you’re going to go look for what are the biggest levers you can find to shift how airmen perceive the service level though they’re getting from IT and focus on those areas. Peter: I want to unpack a couple of terms just to make sure that we’re all using the same words to mean the same thing. I’m not used to thinking of user experience as having a service level mindset, apart from, like, my design team will have a service level commitment, maybe to some part of the business, but that’s not what you’re talking about. So what do you mean when you’re saying service levels in this context and what is UX’s responsibility, if it’s separate from the rest of it. Colt: Yeah. No, great question. Okay. So when I’m talking service levels, I’m using the term a little bit broader than you’re probably thinking about it. So it’s, performance response time and all of those kind of aspects of computing. You know, my computer not crashing, stuff like that, it’s just service levels. Peter: Kind of what we would think of as quality and quality assurance. Colt: Quality assurance. Exactly. But I’m also just thinking of making sure that the applications that you are using are easy to get to, meet your requirements, and are easy to use without having to get a lot of extra training that is specific to the application. There’s a lot of training that you need to do your job, but you shouldn’t need so much training in the tool. So I’m using service levels just in a broader sense. Peter: Almost like, yeah, how we would think of quality. Jesse: Yeah. Colt: One other thing just to clarify, because this confuses a lot of people, and don’t even think about it so much when I talk about it anymore. But keep in mind that I work for the CIO. But my job spans both enterprise IT and software and applications. So, think Google. Google could produce the most fantastic search results on the planet, but if it took 10 seconds to get the search result back, you would still think it was terrible. And we have that kind of problem, right? Trying to putting it on our terms, our search results wouldn’t be that great, and by the way, it would take 10 seconds. So we got to solve both problems. And if I’m trying to move the bar up in a significant way, that is noticeable and meaningful to airmen out doing their part of the mission, then i’m looking for the ways to figure out how to move the bar up on wherever I can get it. So in some cases that’s on the software side, in some cases that’s on hardware systems, networks, operations, wherever I can move the bar up and deliver a better service across all of it. We ask a Big Question Peter: I want to unpack that. ‘Cause something Jesse and I love to talk about is multi-channel, omnichannel, very broad user experience, right? Experience Jesse: strategy. Peter: Yeah, we all come from an environment where people thought UX was screens, very simple kind of software mindset, but we all know that an experience mindset can be brought to bear on a much broader set of challenges. What I’m wondering is, you’re talking about hardware as well as software and other systems. I’m realizing I’m curious about the makeup of your team, right? You’re the first Chief Experience Officer. Who are you assembling in your organization in order to address this variety and complexity of challenges that you’re now facing? Jesse: Well, I actually have a related question that I’d like to piggyback on this which is what did you inherit when you stepped in? Your role was brand new, but the work being done was not, and I’m curious about what you were handed, how you shaped that into something new, and what, to Peter’s point, what did you need to create along the way? Colt: We had to create a lot. Okay. So why don’t I start with that? And then let’s come back to Peter’s question. So I didn’t really inherit much. There was not an existing team. And to Peter’s question, I don’t really have a team. So I’m what’s known as an HQE appointee or highly qualified experts. It’s basically a type of senior executive service equivalent hire. It’s equivalent to a one star general or a first level senior executive service, where the government goes outside directly to commercial industry and brings somebody in with a particular set of expertise to solve a particular problem. And then by law, maybe it’s by policy, but regardless, you have to be done in five years. And one other kind of odd rule is that as an HQE you can’t really manage government people. So it’s kind of like going out and pulling a commercial person into the government for a short period of time. And so when you saw the reboot of healthcare.gov going back about a decade, I think they brought in one, two or more HQE’s. It’s not that unusual, but so I can’t go and like build a team and have a lot of people working for me. What I can do, remember, career professional consultant, is go figure out who’s allied with this cause and line everybody up and get them all working on the same thing. And so that’s what I was able to do. There are multiple organizations that have some stakeholder piece part responsibility for user experience. Most of them don’t call it that, they’re DevSecOps organizations doing software development, or they’re software factories, or they’re software acquisition teams, or they’re IT organizations that are supposed to be optimizing the performance and the security of our networks and systems and desktops and everything else. So there’s lots of organizations that do a piece part of user experience, or they own some part of it. All of them had to be lined up, put together in teams virtually to go after this. All the organizations existed, but the virtual teams going after these problems, thinking about it as UX and performance and then going after it, none of that really existed. We did have software factories. Our largest is called Kessel Run. They’re an interesting group. You may want to talk to them sometime. Over a thousand people now, and they have a pretty robust UX capability. So they existed, but there wasn’t a lot else. And then what had to be built? So the key things that had to be built were,- -keep in mind what my strategy was, let’s go treat airmen as customers, measure UX from their perspective, track service levels, manage service levels, make it better. Okay, so what do you have to do? First thing you got to do is start measuring user experience. And you got to do it across enterprise IT. And then you got to do it across software. It’s a lot easier to do it across enterprise IT. There’s a lot more tools and products, and I don’t need so much consent from individual applications. We’re in an environment with thousands, probably, of individual applications and platforms, if I had to go to each one of them and get permission to monitor their performance, and we can’t use Google Analytics inside our firewalls, but let’s say we could, we wanna attach Google Analytics and maybe do usability testing or something on a thousand applications. I gotta work with a thousand different programs. Can’t do that. So how do you do this? So on the enterprise IT side, we had a thing called the Air Force Survey Office. They use Qualtrics at scale and there’s a FedRAMP moderate version of Qualtrics so we can attach it and we can do surveys. And this is the way, like if you hear about a study in DoD of, pick a topic, whether it’s diversity, inclusion, or retention, or sexual harassment or any other topic people research, this is the platform that they do those studies on. So what I did is, I met with them and then we set up a, what’s now it’s evolved a bit, but starting in January 2020, we began doing a pulse survey of it. And then we launched digital experience monitoring, which gives us performance of all the software running on individual computers. So now we know where it takes a long time to start up in the morning. We have people complaining of 20 minute startup times, boot up times. And, and we know where it is, geographically, bases and everywhere. And then we added a network of boxes that plug into the routers that run a set of tests, looking for things that tend to disrupt performance and mess up performance of software , tests that check our PKI infrastructure, that check various changes that sometimes happen with DNS and in various other things. And so now we’ve got sort of, this is gonna get really geeky really fast, but all seven layers of the OSI stack we’re now monitoring. So we understand the whole technology stack. Really, we understand at the top level what the user is experiencing from the technology stack. That’s on the enterprise IT side. On the software side, more complicated because in order to instrument an application with just basic web analytics… Now understand, you can’t go hook up tools like Google Analytics to our systems, right? Even the unclassified systems, you can’t really do that. On the public facing site, yes, there’s actually a really good public facing version of Google Analytics that’s run by General Services Administration. It’s a great capability, but we can’t use that for our, call it… just inside the firewall stuff. So we, we stood up something called user experience management, and it has a user feedback capability, just a simple link so that users can provide feedback with a simple 3 question survey. And then it has an open source web analytics tool and we’ve gone through two years of security approvals to get it what’s known as ATO or authority to operate on our networks, so that all of our applications on the unclass side of the Air Force for now, and we’re going to try and take this to the classified side, now, all these applications can get basic web analytics and user feedback. That sounds very simple. Like, if you were to go start any business on the public internet, those are probably two of the first things you would attach to your website, right? It’s just a feedback link and web analytics, but our stuff, we can’t, we have not been able to do that. And that’s a problem in the government, by the way. When they did the analysis of what went wrong with healthcare.gov, one of the findings was that they didn’t have web analytics. And I know why they didn’t have web analytics. It’s actually kind of hard to get that in a government site. So we solved that problem. Now that’s being rolled out. There’s several other things we’re doing at the individual application level. But one of the things that I think is unique that we’re doing is we needed a way to start managing the portfolio overall. Influence Without Authority Jesse: What you’re describing sounds like a tremendous effort of orchestration cross-functionally, and I find it especially interesting that you were able to achieve this in a role that is expressly designed to limit the amount of direct control you have over what actually happens, right? You’re expected to wield a lot of influence, but you have very little, it sounds like, direct control or direct authority to actually tell people what to do. Is that true? Colt: That is, that is true. Jesse: How do you get a job this complex done when you have those constraints? Colt: So a couple of ways. I put so much of a focus on metrics measurement because once you have that, then you can provide, what we call in DoD, situational awareness up the chain of command and get buy in. So in other words, if you can show that performance and user experience is bad with certain bases, certain applications, certain missions, and the data is clear and presented clearly, then you can, get buy in, because that’s information that has to be dealt with. That’s, I think, the most powerful thing that you have. I think that’s why I’m such an advocate of a data driven approach. That’s number one. And number two is, you gotta have, you gotta have air cover, because it takes a while to put in place the tools to get that kind of data in quote unquote situational awareness. So you gotta have air cover to be able to get you through to the point where the data is out there and it’s clear and it’s compelling and actionable. And then the third thing I would say is, you have to get a little bit… lucky is not the right word, but you have to get a little bit lucky in the sense that once you start having good situational awareness across a broad portfolio of technology, where you get a lot of data and you can see what’s really going on, then what you need is you need leverage points where sort of the, the 80/20 rule comes into effect or the 90/10 rule, and you can go and say, okay, if we solve these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 problems, even if we solve them 75%, we’re going to get a 20, 30, 40, 50 percent improvement in our metrics. And it’s identifying those points of maximum leverage across the enterprise where you get the biggest result. And if you’ve got enough data visibility, enough visibility across the whole environment, you can start to identify those points. Fundamentally, that’s it. So that’s how we’ve been able to move the needle. Peter: Much of what you’ve been explaining, feels a lot like lifting a floor, right? There was a broadly unsatisfactory level of quality across the systems and your initial orientation was to really like dig in, get that data, really understand kind of where the breaks in the chain are in order to raise the floor. And I’m wondering, because you were, you’ve been there four-ish years, was there a point at which you started to also get to look at raising the ceiling, to think about innovation, to think about net new, or has it really been this very kind of practical, tactical, we just got to get these things working, and then that in and of itself is a win. Colt: So I probably spend at least 50 percent of my time on the “get it working.” And that’s a huge win, by the way, if you look at what airmen complain about most. That’s it. At least in IT. However, to answer your question, yes. So when we conceived my role initially, one of the ideas was there are several, I call them the mega user journeys that apply to almost everybody in the Air Force and Space Force that are not very well automated. They might be partially automated, but they’re automated by multiple different systems. There’s a massive amount of paper involved. The churn involved is insane. And so there were those that I wanted to take on. Peter: You mentioned getting kind of cover from your leadership, but how are decisions made? How do you get on everybody’s backlog or whatever, across this extremely complex organization in a coordinated fashion, such that you can make the progress that you know you need to make. Like, is that just you in a lot of meetings having a lot of conversations? Is there some communication, operational kind of a set of people and practices that can weave this together? Like it just feels daunting. Colt: Well, I mean, it probably is a little bit, but I was very fortunate that I had I’ve had some good bosses and it’s important to have a good boss. I’ve had some good bosses that I was very in sync and they were very in sync with what we wanted to do and what was possible. And so I had air cover when I needed it. But a lot of this is just a tremendous amount of communication. So one of the things that I use to our advantage, when you’re in my role, you do a lot of public speaking and conferences. And so two or three times a month, I’m giving some kind of a public talk and then probably a couple times a week for the last four years, I’m giving some sort of a large group presentation inside the Air Force, going through, okay, on improving performance of enterprise IT. Here’s all the things we’re doing. Here’s the vision. Here’s strategy. Here’s the measurements. Doing demos. Whenever we stood up the tools, people have to believe this stuff is real, right? And they have to experience the benefit. And so I do a lot of demos, demos of our digital experience, monitoring demos of our survey platform, etcetera, etcetera. And then on the software side, same thing. A lot of demos. The job is fundamentally a communication job, making people aware, showing people it’s real, getting people to buy in, coaching people, teaching people, but doing it at scale. And you know, if there’s one thing the DoD does really, really well, we do a lot of things well, actually, but one of the things I do think we do well is communications at scale. We do well. Jesse: So I’ve never worked with the military. What I imagine of that environment is one in which the default answer is going to be no. Unless you can make a pretty strong case for yes, because of the need for things to absolutely work without question. Colt: You’re right. Jesse: And I imagine that that creates a certain amount of institutional risk aversion. It creates a certain amount of skepticism toward new ideas, especially… Experiments that we’ve never tried before. And you came into this role having to advocate for all of those things. And I’m curious about, aside from having really awesome metrics to back you up, how did you make that case? How did you convince people to take on the risk of changing their processes, changing their approaches, looking at things in a new way? Make Change by Connecting to their Past Colt: Great question. And metrics were a big part of that. But there’s a few tricks. You gotta be able to learn and speak the organization’s language and speak to what matters to them. That’s important. And by the way, the notion that you’re talking about, in our environment, they call it the frozen middle. Jesse: Mm. Colt: When it comes to user experience and performance, we actually have, I would say, senior leaders at the Department of the Air Force , we’re talking in the what we call the glass doors level. So I think the top six or so leaders in the Air Force, the second half, the chief, the undersecretary, the vice chief, and the chief master sergeant at that level, they actually use the term user experience which is encouraging. They know what it means and they know what it means to them. They’re not experts, obviously, but at that level they really do get it. And they support it and they want to know how to make it better. And then at the sort of the airman level, they totally get it right. Technology is like air to them. They breathe it. It’s part of their lives. we hire a tremendous number of young people and they just breathe technology. So what everybody talks about is the frozen middle. It’s all these folks that want to say no because they don’t really want to take a risk. So I use Lieutenant Colonel Fitts story a lot. I do a million conference presentations and internal, I close practically every presentation with Fitts because it shows… The point is that human-computer interaction and user experience and human factors engineering, these things are all within the DNA of the Department of the Air Force, right? And you guys know the history here. Frankly, you probably know it better than I do. But in case some of the listeners don’t, the story at a most basic level is that we were losing hundreds of B-17s in World War II in Europe. You can read Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell, good book about it. And, but a lot of these planes, in fact, really thousands we were losing, and but hundreds of these planes flew back into Britain and the pilots would just make a lot of mistakes and the Air Force and our infinite wisdom basically said, Hey, we’re getting crappy pilots. And so they decided, Hey let’s go do a study on this? Right. ‘Cause we’re the government–studies, we do that. And so they hired a, psychologist who had been Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Air Corps. Gone back, got a PhD, comes back as a psychologist and he starts digging into this problem with the intent of helping hire better pilots or choose better pilots, select better pilots. And starts looking at the records of the plane crashes and realizes that there’s patterns in the data. Same types of things were happening again and again and again, right? Pilots that would fly a mission over Europe, come back, land in Britain, and they would open the bomb bay doors instead of put down the landing gear. Things like that. And so he and a pilot and others started looking at the planes and began to realize that what we had was not crappy pilots. It was a badly designed plane. Certain controls were too close together. They looked exactly the same. They worked exactly the same. You know, if you put yourself in the position of these pilots and crews, I mean, good God, I mean, they just flown for hours over Europe. There’s probably smoke in the cockpit, maybe one of their buddies is bleeding in the back or worse, and I mean, the stress that it must be is unimaginable, and then add into that that you flip to a console and the controls are all the same, it’s a miracle anybody got back at all, and so they began redesigning the cockpit of the plane, focusing on things like shape coding of the controls, and it’s interesting, those techniques are used to this day, anytime you tell this story in our environment, there’s almost always an Air Force pilot or a former Air Force pilot on the line and they get in the chat on our team’s call. And they’re like, oh, yeah, that explains why , this control is shaped totally different than this and this one is like a gear and this one is shaped like a flap and I’m like, okay, it turns out those things are still done to this day. So, but the point of telling that story is that anybody in our environment can understand it. They all respect it because there’s a lot of respect for that kind of history in our culture. And it conveys a few things. It conveys being data driven. It conveys solving the problem. It conveys the connectedness to the mission. It conveys frankly, it just conveys that this is within the DNA of our culture and organization already. And if we can tap into it in order to solve problems like that, we can tap into it in order to make the user experience better for our weapon systems today. In World War II, they were a B-17. Well, today, they’re still weapon systems. They’re different, right? There’s a huge IT component to our weapon systems today. It’s not just all about super expensive hardware that circles the globe or whatever. There’s a lot of software. So that’s how we do it. That’s the technique to cut through. Jesse: I love that story. You know, it’s interesting because I asked you, what did you do to talk people into doing something new? And what I got from your answer was that your approach was basically to convince them that it’s not new at all, right? That it’s actually already a part of the culture that they’re a part of. And that this user-centered thinking is really just an evolution of what’s already in the organization. Colt: Totally agree. Think about it. I mean, what are the odds that me, an outsider, are going to come in and change the culture of the Department of Defense? Not going to happen. So, you got to be realistic about that and then… Use the culture for what it’s really good at. And this is something that our culture has been good at in the past and can be going forward. Bringing a Service Mindset Peter: I actually want to build on that, because you wrote a post on LinkedIn and one of the words that I noticed in your post was, “if any of my friends from the commercial world are interested in serving,” and serving is not how we typically talk about the kind of work we do. And I’m wondering, what it has meant to be in an environment where to serve and serving is the value that everybody, to the highest level, is bringing to the work and how that’s affected how you’ve approached it, or evolved and changed how you’ve approached it. Colt: First of all, this doesn’t apply just to DOD, right? I mean, what we’re talking about here really is government service. it’s service to your country or your state or your county or city, it’s government service. I think military work in particular can be a bit of a family business, right? My grandfather was in the Navy. My dad was in the Navy. I was not, but I do this. We need people who are willing to go serve and it doesn’t have to be in the military. It’s a million ways to do it. I have the highest respect for Jennifer Pahlka, who just put out a book called Recoding America and the work that people do in that on the civilian side of the government, and it’s all vital and it’s all technology that has to work, frankly, for the institutions of our country just to operate. So I think it’s a important thing, an honorable thing, and I encourage it for everybody. We have some countries like, I believe, Switzerland and Israel basically require a certain amount of military service. I don’t think it has to be military but I think it’s a good experience for everybody to do some of this, and I think it makes you more connected to , frankly, everyone in our country and around the world, I think whenever you spend some amount of time providing service. So something I feel strongly about, and I would highly encourage anyone in the commercial sector, as I was, if you’re interested in doing something like this, if you’re a UX designer, software developer, whatever, and you’re interested, reach out to me anytime. Peter: I’m wondering how your posture in leading this kind of work shifted as you approached it with this serving mindset versus a more consulting approach. Colt: Yeah, really good question. From my perspective, you have to take sort of a balance. There was a two star general that I respect tremendously, General Schmidt, who was in acquisition and in a week or two after I started in the job he kind of asked me, okay, well, how are you going to approach this? And of course, I didn’t have much of anything at that point. And the first thing out of my mouth was, well, it’s going to take a lot of humility. And I think that’s one, that’s a big part. So when you’re going to be a change agent and you’re going to try and really move the bar in an organization this big, and you gotta have a certain amount of humility because there is so much you have to learn and you have to just recognize that at the same time, you also come in with a completely different perspective and you’ve got to be confident in that. And do your homework and rely on a lot of experts. So as I was preparing to take this job. I leaned on friends that were former CIOs, current CIOs and kind of laid out the problem to them and they all kind of pointed and here’s sort of what your strategy is going to have to be. This is the only way that will work. So I would say humility plus confidence, not arrogance, but a certain amount of humility plus confidence, making sure you’ve done your homework and have in your back pocket a plan that has been proven to scale elsewhere and will apply. Jesse: I’m curious about the future for you, and where you see all of this going, and what role do you see for yourself going forward? Colt: Sure. Let me hit four things. So Air Force, DoD, federal government, and then me. So Air Force. We have a new CIO, Venus Goodwine, and she replaced our last CIO, Lauren Knausenberger, just last month. She is committed to building on and expanding what I have been doing. And I’m not going to make any announcements beyond that, but what we’re doing will go forward in the Air Force. DoD, I think you’re going to see some exciting things when it comes to UX and performance software and I T. The CIO at the Department of Defense is named John Sherman, and he’s absolutely committed to this. They have already stood up something called the Office Performance Management. And they’re going to be doing some of the similar things. And frankly, you’re also seeing the same type of playbook we’ve executed here at the Air Force. You’re now seeing the Navy pick that up and run with it. And I think you’re going to see it elsewhere in DoD and probably increasingly coordinated DoD wide by the overall CIO for the Department of Defense. So this is going to become more than just an Air Force thing. It actually already has. And then federal government. There’s a tremendous amount of activity in UX and CX across the federal government. And I’m not really qualified to talk about it at length. But I am part of those networks, at least in terms of all the email distributions and some of the conferences and things. It’s super exciting. You’ve probably heard of the 21st century IDEA Act and there’s various federal policies and policies from the White House and OMB to raise the bar for citizen experience across the federal government. They’re also creating a lot of resources for people like me and organizations like this one , tools, resources. So the survey tool that we’re using just for feedback on applications, it’s called Touchpoints. That’s a GSA tool that we can use even in our environment behind our firewall, which is very interesting. So they’re, they’re doing some amazing things. And then last, me, personally. So I have a rough plan. And part of it’s going to be advising regarding user experience within DoD. I won’t go any more to it than that. So I’m going to continue to be engaged within DoD. And then I was with a small company before and I’m probably going back to a small company. And in fact, I’ve got a idea and a little bit of a plan for a startup. So, I may be in the startup world here in the near future. Jesse: Very exciting Colt. Thank you so much. This has been great. Peter: Yes, Thank you. This has been really eye-opening. Jesse: Colt, where can people find you on the Internet if they want to follow up with you on this conversation? Colt: Honestly, best way is LinkedIn. I’m not a huge Twitter user or X user. LinkedIn’s pretty reliable. Jesse: Fantastic. Peter: Excellent. Jesse: Thank you so much. Colt: Thank you. Jesse: For more FindingOurWay, visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership. Jesse: Hardware design, software design, package design, experience design. Rajat Shail oversees all of it for home automation company Vivint. Rajat joins us to share what he’s learned about managing design as a holistic function, the benefits and pitfalls of using design thinking training to engage executives, and what to do when your mandate is broader than your boss’s. Peter: Rajat, thank you so much for joining us today. Rajat: Thanks, Peter. Thanks for the invite. It’s good to see you and Jesse. Peter: So we’re just going to start at the top, which is to better understand: who are you, what you do, current role, responsibilities, what it is that you’re up to these days. Rajat: Great. I’ll give you a quick synopsis. I am currently leading the design team, user experience team, and the industrial design team and working very closely with the research and insights team here at Vivint, which is a home automation company, which recently got acquired by a Fortune 120 company called NRG, which is focused on delivering great energy solutions. So we’re really looking at what we call a category of one where we’re looking at home automation along with energy combined, could be a really nice foray into how people live in the future in smart homes. A little bit about me. I started my design journey in India, I did my undergrad and masters in India in design. Worked there for a short time, moved to this country about 20 years ago, and went on a journey working for different companies like Motorola, Whirlpool, Honeywell, Resideo, Bose, and then most recently at Vivint. My journey has been starting from being an industrial designer to getting to Institute of Design, Chicago, and focusing more on design methods and frameworks and strategy. Not practicing it as much because you know, when you just start, you’re at a certain elevation where you can’t really influence thought leadership at a very high level, but you can use those frameworks in your work and projects. But as I grew in my career, I not only started to focus more on training, you know, the VP/GMs on design thinking, but also started to, over a decade last decade, I started to make a transition into the digital space because there is no such thing as, you know, hardware design, digital design, it’s the end to end experience. So, in order to be more holistic in creating a great customer value, I had to learn on the job from some of the best digital designers UI, UX. And for the last 10 years, I’ve focused more on digital, less on hardware, even though I manage hardware teams and I’m very familiar with that. So that’s been my journey. Spanning the physical and digital Jesse: What was the biggest shift in mindset for you as you made that transition from the focus on hardware into the digital? Rajat: That’s a really great question, Jesse. I think I asked myself that question a lot, right? Like what, what makes me special? The biggest shift was starting with imposter syndrome, saying, “Oh, I’m trying to play digital designer when I’m not really traditionally trained as one,” to starting to figure out that there are things I bring to the table as a traditionally hardware designer, which make me more adept at understanding things differently, which was, basically, in industrial design, people are looking at form and function together, right? And in digital, I noticed that there were a lot of subcategories around interaction design, visual design, usability, which was not something we typically divorce in hardware. So for me, when I started to look at interaction design, when I started to look at UI, UX, I was looking at the visual design and the interaction, mental models and the information architecture with the, holistic lens. And I found myself to be good at that because I could look at something that potentially looked complex, could be simplified with better visual design and vice versa, right? So to me, I felt like I was realizing in meetings that there was something there that I brought to the table, which everyone doesn’t naturally have, because they’re so specialized, and of course, it was a journey and learning from the best interaction designers and visual designers to really understand the realization has also been that it’s not about digital or physical design. It’s about what is the best way to solve a problem, right? And digital design, hardware design, just enablers in the journey to solve that. We focus a lot on touch points, but it’s really about the experience, the end experience and the most acute realization for me has been as little design as possible and sometimes really forcing myself not to design a piece of hardware and not to design a feature on a, product in a, like an app, which is not needed. Peter: So a big reason we were interested in having you join us is that, as we’ve been talking with design leaders, they’re often purely software, maybe software and service, but you’re distinct in that you’ve maintained this connection with hardware, industrial design in I think for your last three jobs, right: Honeywell, Bose, and now Vivint. You know, we’ve talked to other former industrial designers who have kind of let go of that. I work with one, a different design leader at an enterprise SaaS company who was trained in industrial design, but now works primarily in software and service. And I’m wondering how you’ve been able to maintain a career at this intersection of hardware and software. And, were you motivated specifically to stay there or did it just happen? Rajat: Yeah. Again, you’re asking me questions that I’ve asked myself a lot. Honestly, it would have been easier to move into digital in its entirety because of its complexity, but to be able to manage teams which are very hardware focused, which work still in a very very waterfall approach versus digital teams, which are working with very different set of engineers in a more agile approach, it would have been easier to focus on one, but I continue to realize that design is holistic. It’s integrated, right? Today’s experiences are physical. They are physical and digital coming together. If you do not look at this holistically, you start to see a disconnect in the work. And it’s, apparent, like there are cases where I’ve seen the hardware is great, and I actually work for those companies, but the software is very poor; or the software is very robust, but the hardware touch point, the first point of delight of holding something in your hand which delivers additional experience, is just weak. You cannot not look at these together. And of course my heart is in both the places. So it’s become something more of a natural approach for me now to switch on and off between the two teams and how they think. And I’ve also come to see that both sets of designers slightly look at design differently, right? Their approach is different. And it always makes me chuckle when I see that fine difference on how an interaction designer solves a problem versus an industrial designer solves a problem. I sometimes feel really, really fortunate that I can see from both those sides and almost to the extent now that I’m able to see it from a mechanical engineer’s perspective as well as a software developer’s perspective very clearly. Peter: You are leading design and I’m wondering what it means to lead these two flavors of design and how you maybe, do you need to show up differently with the digital side than you do with the hardware and industrial design side, or are you showing up the same and trying to help them understand that they have more in common than they thought? But like, how does it affect how you lead when you have these teams that you’re responsible for that have different perspectives, preconceptions, different kind of starting points themselves. Rajat: Yeah there is a difference both in the engineering development as well as the product leadership within both teams, right? There is a stark difference. One is focused on getting the word that I like the least, which is minimum viable product, into the market. The other one is rabidly idealistic about creating the greatest hardware and tools. Neither one is wrong, because in digital it’s easier to go back and refine. In hardware, once you cut the tools, it’s very difficult to go back and make those continued improvements and refinements. So, that being said, I also like to believe in any product development, once you launch something, the followup becomes an afterthought, right? And, and so I like to use the word minimum lovable product as we use here at Vivint. What is the best experience that we can give and then build on longterm value on that? So, changing this mindset, that let’s not just focus on the speed, but let’s focus on the quality of the experience which is loved, and at both those touch points is what’s been very different for me within the teams. Jesse: You know, it’s interesting because what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard in a lot of organizations that are in the hardware business fundamentally, is that the software design is almost never actually unified with hardware design in this respect. In a lot of cases, I hear from people on the software side who wish they had more interaction with, who wish they had more engagement with the industrial design side. Apple famously tried to organize all of design under Jonny Ive on both the hardware and the software sides before deciding that that unification didn’t work. What do you think makes this unification work in these contexts that you’ve seen that other people are finding so challenging? Rajat: They’re finding it challenging because the natural order of things is to create focus and speed, which frankly is achieved through a siloed approach. When you are in your lane and you’re moving fast, you’re not looking around. You achieve the speed that you need, but it also leads to a level of compromise on the quality, Jesse. Building a culture of just ‘design’ Rajat: I don’t know how it played out at Apple. It was very interesting to hear Jonny Ive when he took over the interaction design team. What I’ve learned to do is, I think it starts from ground up, right? You really have to build a culture where designers are not calling themselves UX designers or industrial design. They’re just calling themselves designers or design thinkers. I would extend that all the way to engineering and product because we train product folks to do good design thinking, right? So we need to be very, very open to anyone who is thinking creatively, thinking from a user-centered point of view to be addressed as a designer, right? It comes down to very small, ground-up changes, making people sit together, okay? So they look over the shoulder and understand and learn every day from each other. Start to find these nice synergies and wonderful moments where they find that if I did this thing slightly different, the person who is connected to this experience can alter their design. So I’m finding those magical moments by forcing people to listen to each other. It’s very easy for an industrial designer to switch off during a design review with the UX. And it’s very easy for a UX designer to switch off during industrial design. I often ask questions to people so they stay a little bit more aware. That’s at a design level. At a leadership level, and this is a practice we started at Honeywell and I gained a lot from that, we don’t like to review designs. We like to review experiences. So let’s say you’re designing a soundbar, okay, for a home entertainment system. You don’t want to review the hardware of the soundbar, the industrial design or the UX. You want to review the end to end experience. How is someone going to buy this? What is that? How is someone going to find out about the soundbar? And what is it about it that’s so unique? How are they going to purchase it? What is that purchase experience? And how is it better than everything else out there? How are they going to get it shipped to them? What does their out of box experience feel like and then what does their first time user experience of setting it up feel like and then part of that is the hardware, part of that is the software install flow, and then finally how does it feel like when they start to use it for the first time and 60 days and what does long term value? So we kind of lay this out in a long table, almost 20 feet long and we build all these touch points and prototypes and have our leadership go through it to say this is the product. The product is not what you’re holding in your hand. The product is that entire journey that customer is going to go through. Which, frankly, Apple, I mean, I was trying to avoid using the Apple word, but Apple set the ground rules for it, right? Really well for us. And they’ve shown us the map and it’s shame on us if we don’t follow that, a good customer journey is what people enjoy more. For the longest time, people struggled that Apple’s features are not as good as maybe some Android phones. That’s not the reason why people are buying Apple phones. People are buying Apple phones for the consistency of the ecosystem and knowing that they just need to learn once and rinse and repeat, right? At different touch points, whether they’re in the Apple store or the Apple website or on the help desk, right? So I think that approach is what I am forcing leadership to look at holistically. And then you, you get a lot of help from different functions, because when you bring so many minds together people come up with newer ideas, which a traditional UX person would not have thought of, which a traditional marketing person would not have thought of, right? The power of forcing functions Jesse: A few times now you’ve used the word “forcing” to describe the way that you engage different parts of the organization with new ideas. Forcing the designers to see things in different ways, forcing the executives to see things in different ways. Forcing is some pretty strong language to use, and I wonder, you know, does it have to be a fight? Rajat: I don’t say that in a pejorative way. It’s not forcing as a fight, but more like, in big corporations, speed and cost are the defining factors, right? People want to get things out and the natural order of things is the path of least resistance, is the shortest path, but it’s not the best path. It’s often the minefield also, people like to focus on their function, whether it’s the finance person, whether it’s the, even the CEO or the salesperson in what they are good at. They do not have the time to understand the other functions and see how well they can integrate their thinking with that. When a designer is designing something, they look at solving problems. They look at understanding the value proposition. A salesperson can gain a lot from that. In defining what the sales and marketing approach, go-to-market strategy is. So forcing I say because… let me put it this way. There is a really great practice that’s happening at Amazon right now, which Mr Bezos describes as forcing function, which is they don’t allow any PowerPoints. They say when a product person is going to present their product plan for a new product, we’re going to have all the cross functional people sit down together around a table, including the executives because the executives have attention of a gnat, right? Attention span of a gnat. We tell them to keep their phones away. They sit down and they are going to read the six-pager. Everybody in the room is sitting quietly for an awkward 35 40 minutes reading the six pager. And understanding they’re not looking at quick slides and taking key points. They’re reading the story, the value prop, the go-to-market strategy, the experiences. It’s well articulated. It’s well written. And they are reacting after that to that. To me, that is a force function, which is very uncomfortable because we live in a world of Keynotes and PowerPoints. But when you force people, when you incentivize people to collaborate, it starts with a forcing function and then it becomes a natural behavior. So that’s the change I’m talking about. Peter: Following that thread. One of the leaders we spoke with, last year, was Kaaren Hanson. and she mentioned operating mechanisms, right? One of her ways in to making change is by identifying the operating mechanisms and placing what she wants in there so that the system then kind of carries forward her agenda and it sounds a little bit like what you’re saying with with these forcing functions, the six pagers, that kind of thing. I’m wondering what solutions you might have come up with in these last five, 10 years as you’ve been leading across these different design practices, that maybe weren’t there to begin with, or that the parties in one side didn’t know about, but that you’ve introduced as a way to kind of affect the operating mechanisms, apply these forcing functions. Are there practices, are there activities, new ways of working, that you have either borrowed from your past that others weren’t doing in this new context that you were able to bring forward, or that you had to generate whole cloth? ‘Cause you’re like, we actually don’t have a way of helping digital and hardware work best together, and so we have to come up with something. Like how has that gone for you? Rajat: A lot of war scars have taught me it’s not through best practices. It’s through failure that I learned things that don’t work and they sound really good in TED talks, but they don’t end up working. And some of the best practices are the ones that I learned from mentors and the ones that I learned through failure because I was doing it wrong, and repeatedly doing it wrong. I’ll break this down into two sections here, Peter and Jesse. One is at a leadership level. How would you approach this? And one is at an individual contributor. Because everyone really, and I don’t say this in a cliched way, I do believe everyone is a leader at their level, right? It’s a leadership mentality more than a position. At a leadership level, you create this cultural change through operating mechanisms, absolutely. But the operating mechanism cannot just be another overtly shown process because people get fatigued by that, right? You have to create very subtle insertions of interaction. As a leader, what has worked for me is you want to bring change, if you want to bring collaboration, you have to continue every day to do bottom-up approach and top-down approach simultaneously. There is not one approach that fits all. Which means like, if you are forcing the awareness around design and collaboration, you need to start training. At Honeywell, we trained about 60 VP GMs on design thinking, including the CEO, which gave us carte blanche. Once they got it, it’s like religion. Like, we get it. We believe in this. Go hire more people. That’s the reason we were able to scale our teams from 10 people to 300 and something people. Because the realization was we absolutely, absolutely need these cross-functional thinkers and connective tissue. So, at a leadership level, it’s about building that and it’s building real empathy for me in my leadership role. It has been about learning to think like a product leader, learning to think like a finance person, learning to think like a salesperson, which is not taught in design schools. It’s been a journey for me and we get so focused on how design is the most important thing. You just really figure out it’s a subset of a larger mechanism that is an organization. So once you understand what, and this is where I think “customer-centric thinking” is most often overly used word and underused practice, right? Your customers are also your stakeholders around you, right? Like if my finance person has no idea what I’m talking about, if I cannot tie it to how his P&L is going to change, or a marketing person. So those collaborations happened at Bose with a fantastic marketing leader who understood what we were trying to say. So you have to learn to speak that language. That’s at a leadership level. Learn from functions outside of design Rajat: At an individual contributor level, I think it’s, it’s really about setting up mentorship programs, right? I was lucky to have managers who said, you need to find a mentor who’s not in the design organization. You need to spend at least an hour a month with this person to really understand what this person deals with every day, and what their challenges are. So that was a great practice for me because I didn’t know anything. My first mentor in my experience here in America was a person from supply chain, and I’m like, what has supply chain got to do with design, right? And it was such a great relationship because I understood there were so many problems to be solved in supply chain which design could solve and which me helping think, in a design thinking way, could, I could solve for him also. And he taught me so many things about the real challenges of sourcing, you know, materials, sourcing product, and it’s the same for other functions. So, one is really, finding for individual contributors, mentors outside, and then again, putting them in those environments where they learn. Designers have this habit of sharpening the same pencil, right? If someone’s great at Figma, they’ll continue to get good at Figma. Someone’s good at sketching, they’ll continue to be good at sketching. Stop sharpening the same pencil, sharpen new pencils, right? And again, I use the word force because people find it difficult to get out of their comfort zone. Telling people, okay, tomorrow I want you to spend a day with our finance person and tell me what does she look for from this organization. It creates an amazing amount of empathy, and understanding, holistic understanding and improves their communication skill when they are trying to create that kind of holistic design approach. Jesse: I love the approach that you’re describing here, this holistic understanding that you create by taking the perspectives and the points of view of lots of different people and being able to speak all of their languages. But as I think about the scope of what you’re describing, software and hardware and packaging and everything that touches the experience, putting it all together into that journey spanning that 20 foot long table. I look down that table and I see a long line of invested stakeholders with different agendas that you’ve just invited into this process. How do you manage the complexity of all those different needs, all those different requirements, all those different points of view, and reconcile those into something coherent? Peter: And not get bogged down or, Jesse: paralysis, right? Peter: …paralysis. Yeah. Get pulled in so many directions that you can’t make any movement because you, you start one direction, then someone else is like, nope. So yeah. Rajat: Yeah, that is, that’s a brilliant observation because that is true. When you set up all these touchpoints and this entire journey, which is dependent on so many things from sourcing to software development to yeah, yeah, we are great at building great smoke and mirror show. But then it has to be delivered, right, at the end of the day, and the dependencies are all these leaders from other functions who are, like, this is awesome but at the end of the day, how do I do this? I think there have been those reviews, executive reviews, which have gone really well and there have been ones which have not gone well. But what my learning has been is, firstly, you have to be very careful about the invitee list for that level of executive review. Right? You cannot open it up for everyone and their sister and brother, right? It has to be the right number of people. Secondly, you have to set the stage to tell people it doesn’t matter who we work for. It doesn’t matter what we do at that company. What matters is this is what our customer’s going to see at the end of the day. Okay. So keeping a focus on the fact to say, please put on your customer-centric glasses at this point and stop thinking about your function. It doesn’t matter. And thirdly, I think the most important one, at least for me as a design leader, has been having the humility to really listen because most often I’ve found myself, I don’t know what I don’t know. Many times someone will tell me something which I have no understanding or I have no background in, or I have completely failed to register because I’m not a dev guy, but the kind of dev load this is going to take on the existing architecture. So, not to be reactive and just kind of take in that input and set up a series of follow up meetings to say, I understood your point, but I would like you to kind of explain me a little bit more on how we can resolve that. So a typical review like that is typically followed by a series of follow ups after and sometimes even before. Because the one thing I learned about design leadership is you should have presented the work to everyone you’re going to invite in a group setting before the group setting, you don’t want to find yourself in a position where if I’m inviting Jesse and Peter to gain alignment on something, and I’m exposing this thing to them at the first time, at first glance here, they’re going to have a lot of feedback to give. So you need to collect feedback. You need to have them get familiar with what they’re going to see in an individual setting and then bring them together so they can see each other’s perspective and kind of calibrate on the level of acceptance and the level of interest that the executive leadership is wanting in actually delivering something that… Because at the end of the day, no level of complexity, no level of internal politics, no level of personal conflict matters. What really matters is, is the customer going to like and should we do this for the customer, right? And that’s what we really need to see at the end of the day and make it possible. So I’ve often seen people who have been completely disagreeing many times find themselves in this group setting and find that the majority is agreeing with this path and very quickly their opinions change and they find a solution where there wasn’t one. Jesse: Hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Peter: Interesting. Do you, Rajat, have the authority to bring all these people together? And related to that is, what you are being held accountable for, what is your leadership or whomever you’re accountable to expecting of you? Do you have metrics that you’re expected to move? Or some other kind of defined accountability in the organization that then gives you the authority to do certain things? And thus, yeah, you can say, hey. ” You five people. I need you in this room” and they will listen to you because of an authority and accountability. If you could unpack some of that. Influence without authority; taking accountability Rajat: Yeah, that is a big challenge, Peter. I think you both are really asking some really deep questions. Design has a lot of opinion with very little authority. I can share that based on my experiences. And no matter how strong the position is, unless you’re working for a founder company who is complete design enlightened person. And there are companies like that, like Apple, where Steve Jobs completely understood the value of design implicitly. Or I would say even another great example would be Logitech, where Bracken Darrow understands design and uses the Chief Design Officer as his right hand person to bounce off ideas. You don’t often find those situations or Airbnb for that reason, right? Airbnb really gets it. You often have very little authority, but you have presence and you have a seat at the table. So you have to employ a lot of different techniques to gain alignment. We try to use this approach is, and I’ll get to the second part, which you’re asking them, how do you measure the success for someone in a leadership role? But firstly, getting people to align is not about aligning with design. It’s about aligning with what we call a winning definition, right? So once we’re out of the fuzzy front end, we come up with what’s called a winning definition. This is what we believe from a user experience perspective, from a tech perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, from a business side, the three legged stool. This is what is going to be a winner for you, a winning definition. Okay, you are going to be evaluated… If you agree that this is winning definition, because we have research to say that customers are going to love this. We have research to say that our numbers say that it’s going to give you the projected revenue and growth. We have the research or we have your opinion to say that this is a viable, a feasible product, feasibility, viability and desirability. Once you align on that, then that becomes the measure for success for each one of us. When you go into design validation stage later on, which is many months later, you want to compare it with the winning definition. And if you strayed way too far from it, you can easily identify who dropped the ball and who didn’t drop the ball, right? And what were the dependencies there that led to, I started with a horse and I ended with a donkey on the other side. There were a lot of compromises made. Death by a thousand cuts, right? So you need to be able to hold yourself accountable to the vision that you collectively set. As a designer, success of a design group or even a design leader is very difficult. I’ll be honest, we have so many dependencies. Most companies have tried to figure out a metrics for success And they try to go with, you know, PSAT scores or customer engagement scores. And, but I still think they’re very nebulous, right? Because to parse out from that, how much was design’s accountability versus engineering versus marketing is always very difficult. But that being said. I think that’s where design leadership is a little bit organic, right? You can see a design champion has to be someone who is fighting the good fight very, very clearly. He or she is not the silent person on the table. I will go as far as to say I, I do believe design function is the true champion of the customer in large organizations, which are fortunately or unfortunately driven by revenue growth, are driven by volume expansion. Designers are driven by this other ideology that we learn in our colleges, which is all about great customer experience and delight. Companies often focus on the outcome, which is building revenue and making money. That’s not an outcome. The outcome is great design, which leads you to make money. Right? Because you could argue, like, making money is not a goal. Everybody, every company has that. Corporations have been set up to generate revenue and market share. People often confuse that with the end goal, right? So I don’t know. It’s very difficult question to answer. Every place I’ve worked at, I’ve tried to kind of calibrate into how do we create great measures of success for design and I’ll be upfront and say it’s not easy. It’s not that easy to define true success because it’s so interwoven with other functions. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If the product does well, everybody wins, right? Where design leadership needs to be judged is did this person call out the right things at the right time? And did this person put the right red flags at the right time? Or put the veto, and those are difficult decisions, right? To be in a place where everybody is like thumbs up and high fiving and there’s a design leader, she is saying ,I don’t think we should go to market with this, it’s a very difficult position to be I think, that needs to be rewarded and appreciated rather than being seen as, oh design is again creating you know, a challenge for us, which is going to delay launch. Jesse: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point because as you mentioned earlier, large scale organizations are optimized to maximize speed and reduce cost. And design almost always feels like it is pulling in the opposite direction against those things. And you know, it’s interesting to hear what you have to say about defining success metrics. ‘Cause it is obviously something that lots of organizations struggle with. Lots of design leaders struggle with. What I notice in there is that it’s one thing to talk about measuring the success of something after it’s launched. It’s a different thing to justify the continued and growing investment in design on the part of an organization. And it’s on the design leaders often to make the case to these executives who don’t have good metrics, who have, as you point out, their own lenses, their own ways of seeing things. You have built and scaled multiple design teams, as you have said, in the absence of really good, strong metrics to justify those efforts. How do you get people to continue to invest in design and to put more investment in design in a situation like that? Rajat: Again, it varies from organization to organization and it is very top down in my opinion. Organizations with the executive leadership team and the CEO understand design intrinsically, it’s not difficult. I’ve worked in those organizations where they’re like, we get it. You don’t have to explain it to me. I get it. I saw Steve Jobs turned their company 800x. Design… they talk about design. Okay. Thank you Steve Jobs for doing that for us, right? But in most companies they are driven by saying, okay, design sounds nice, let’s sprinkle a little design on this, and they treat design as a service function not as a strategic partner, right? The job for a design leader in those organizations is especially difficult, because not only do they have to convince the value of design amongst the peers, they also have to build competency and capability to scale to deliver that, right? So you, you are saying that this will allow us to win the race, but you’re building the car while you are participating in the race, right? It’s difficult. So how do you show that? And I think again, we can get into this. There are matrices to measure input in terms of what the bottom line is. What I’ve at least noticed is it really comes down to training top down leadership on design thinking, okay. Once they understand and at least what worked for me in a very large Fortune 100 company was, don’t try to boil the ocean. Start small Rajat: Start small, like a prototype, locate your design organization as a prototype, right? If a big corporation has five verticals each multibillion dollar vertical and sub verticals, don’t try to create a design impact across. Focus on one or two strategic business units and show the results of participating, putting design embedment into that, and showing… And you don’t have to show it to the people who are working with the designers, because they’ll spend a month and be like, I love having a designer make me think very differently and bring a lot of value and research and quality. They will get converted. Once you are able to embed that and show what the results look like in terms of the P&L, then you can scale it across organizations, then every VP/GM is going to say, I want a similar kind of team embedded within my group, because I saw what happened in complement with the training that they went through, right? So start small and scale big, and hope that there is not a lot of executive leadership change that happens in that process. Jesse: It’s interesting that you describe training the executives in design thinking as a key part of the strategy here, because in my experience, what I hear about initiatives to train executives in design thinking, I hear two different stories. One is, Oh man, the design thinking training, it was a total bust. We went in there, we taught them everything. We showed them all the frameworks and the methods and stuff. And they said, Hey, that was fun. And they patted us on the head and they sent us back to our cubicles. The other story that I hear is, yeah, the design thinking training was a huge success. All the executives that got way into it, they’ve decided to incorporate it into their own decision making processes and they decided that they don’t need us there at all. So how have you managed to find the third way here? Rajat: Jesse, the second thing is happening to the entire design function, to be honest overall, right now, we have manufactured the guns to shoot ourselves, we have trained people in design thinking, which has led to people thinking that they don’t need designers, which is not true, which is not true. I think it comes down to the level of maturity and style of design training, where a little bit of knowledge doesn’t mean… and it’s cyclical, right? Like, a lot of product leaders who have gone through design thinking think they understand it and some of them do. And the reaction: one is, that I want to build a design team. Like I currently report to a chief product officer whose background is engineering, but he’s a brilliant product leader. But during the early days of his career, he got a chance to work at frog as an engineer, and he told me that, you know, when I worked at frog, it opened up a different side of my mind, which I never knew. I have never felt the need to convince him of design thinking because he gets it. In fact, he pushes me on more design, more design, right? So once you turn on that switch, it can lead to a reaction saying, I get it. And I don’t need a big design team. I’ll just work with consultants and hire them as needed or it can lead to a thinking saying I get it and I need equal parts designers and engineers, right? Both those situations are not bad. In my opinion, if you’re an in-house designer, you might complain about the first one saying all the design is getting outsourced, right? But the challenge with that is it’s great for the front end thinking, but then when you have to deliver designs, you really need embedded designers and it can get very costly because design product development time takes very long. It’s great for consultants because confusion at the part of client is money for the… right, right? And I don’t criticize either one of those parts. The way I have at least tried to do is when we did design training, it was a two day event. We didn’t make it abstract. We said, bring your best people and bring the biggest problem that you’re facing in your organization right now. And let’s use that as an example. And when they see that, how much we uncover in two days, whether it’s about problem identification, root cause, or about solution space, they just can’t leave it at that because that directly impacts their end of year goals. And they’re like, I need you to put two designers in my team right now. I want to continue on this path, right? If you make it very abstract, then they, it’s like reading a good book and they’ll forget it in a couple of days, pretty much. Jesse: Hmm. Peter: Did this role already exist before you joined or was this role created when you joined? And then, two parter, how has the role evolved or how has your mandate evolved since you’ve been there? Rajat: This is a great question, Peter. I’m smiling because I wanted to share this story, but I didn’t know how I’ll weave this into this conversation. Peter: Boom! Rajat: I was always interested in home automation because I feel homes are very analog in my opinion right now, right? Our cars are a lot more advanced than our homes and we pay only like, we pay 20x on a house versus a car. But our cars have smart security, smart comfort, you know, all kinds of smart lighting our homes don’t. And when you live with those homes, with those features, you realize, a home can care for you, can understand you and know you. And be very, very proactive in terms of setting conditions that you want during different times of the day, different times of the year. So for me, it’s a very fascinating space. And I think we will live in an era where we’ll remember homes when they were very analog versus homes when they were very smart, right? And we’re going through that transition right now. When I was approached by this company, because I also worked at a spinoff of Honeywell called Residio, which was also focused on home automation, which is when I started to understand the potential of the space is incredible if done right. If I can convince my grandmother and grandfather to understand home automation, I win. Right now we are only targeting power users who like cameras, who like devices. It’s not about devices. It’s about experiences that the home can create for you. So, I found out about this company Vivint, which started as basically buying hardware and selling hardware door to door to getting into the service space, to getting into building their own platform, to building into new services and domains like insurance and energy. So, I was like, this company has been making right moves. They reached out to me and said, we are looking for a design leader. I’m like, okay, you don’t have a design leader right now, you have done so many things which are changing the home automation market. They said, we have a leader for UX. We have a leader for industrial design. But both those leaders are recognizing that their teams need a voice at a much higher level, right? And I was like, wow, this realization is incredible. And the chief product officer pretty much said, I need someone who sits with me and can understand me and help me understand the design team better, because the leadership I have right now is so focused on following directions and delivering on what is required in a fantastic way, that sometimes I don’t know if I’m able to build their capabilities to their full potential. So I need someone who can look at it at a higher altitude and understand how design can be woven together, both in terms of customer-facing, non-customer-facing, which is service techs, sales channels, marketing, someone who can really bring this as end to end experience. To me, that story resonated really strongly. And I’m like, okay, they know what design can do. And that’s why they’re looking for it. I was interviewed by the chief product officer, the CEO, and people I manage today, which is great, because they wanted to see who is going to be this person who’s going to be our leader. So my managing staff, my directors, they interviewed me and they said, this could be the right person for us. So for me, that was very comforting that there’s not just a realization at an executive level, there’s a realization at the team level to say, we simply don’t have that vantage point, nor do we have the time to be able to focus. We have to focus on the eye of the fish. We can’t focus on the blue ocean. We need someone to be able to look at where we are, look at it at a different altitude. Peter: And that was a year and a half ago. Has the role been the same for that year and a half or has it evolved since you’ve been there, and if so, how so? Rajat: It’s been one of the smallest teams I’ve managed in my career. And it has been one of the most rewarding teams I’ve managed because I have never had a chance to work with a product leader and executive leadership team, which is so woke in terms of design. So I’ve not had to train them or push those agendas because they understand it. What has changed is we started as a mid-size company of five to $6 billion, and we got acquired by this massive company called NRG, which is based out of Houston. And NRG also doesn’t have a complementary group as a design group there, right? So they are now looking at us and thinking, wow, they have a design group. How do we use a design group? We have five apps and we have websites and we have products and, but energy is a commodity at the end of the day. How do we build energy as an experience and story where we can differentiate in markets like Texas and you know, the Southwest where people can shop for energy, you can buy energy from different vendors, right? So what is that experience around energy that differentiates us? So I think what has changed is now I have to really think even bigger than I was thinking to really understand our home automation now includes energy and our Trojan horse into people’s home is not going to be just a security story, but it’s going to be energy story which will be complemented by energy, comfort, lighting, aging in place, and all the other things. So I think that’s what’s changed is I’m recalibrating, how do I scale up my role in a way that I’m best able to serve the needs of the new company? When your mandate is broader than your boss’ Peter: Something I hear from folks I work with. So you report to a chief product officer… Rajat: Mm-hmm. Peter: …but it sounds like your mandate goes beyond your boss’s mandate. You mentioned things like packaging. That’s typically a marketing responsibility that you’re involved with, that would be separate from your chief product officer. You were also mentioning end to end experience, so there’s likely some, some relationship with sales or channels or whatever that you’re looking at that would be beyond your chief product officer’s remit. And I’m wondering what, if any, struggles you’ve had in going beyond the bounds of the silo that you happen to find yourself in? As you recognize, end to end means literally end to end, but they had to put you somewhere and you’re not reporting to the CEO. So, your leader does have bounds that are maybe closer in than your own. Rajat: There is a saying, right? Culture eats strategy for lunch, right? A good strategy would be having a very robust operating model where there is dotted line reporting, direct reporting, and a very clear structure. I would love to have that. But since we’ve just gone from a relatively smaller company to a much bigger company, it would be a little audacious and a little bit assuming of me to want that happen immediately. I need to be part of that change. But what is working really well is the culture of this company is so strong that there is a very innate sense of working together. So I haven’t had to lean on an operational structure as much as I would have in other companies because the relationships are so close with the marketing, with the sales, that they are opening doors and they’re saying, yes, tell us you don’t need to be part of our structure or my reporting structure. So I’m able to influence that more easily when I hit a wall, I will go back and knock on the executive doors and say, we need a more robust structure because I can only take goodwill that far. Jesse: So I’d love to zoom out of this context and look at design leadership broadly, if we can for a second, ’cause you’ve got a, a unique perspective, on the challenge and the opportunity of design leadership. And I’m curious what you think is missing in design leadership. The way that other people talk about the role and the challenges and, and maybe the opportunities that other people are overlooking here. What are some ways of thinking about design leadership that you feel like are underrepresented in how people talk about it Rajat: You know, I, it’s so difficult to answer this question because I was just at Institute of Design meeting with a lot of my friends who I graduated with, who had come back for a panel session there. There were a lot of design leaders there. And I don’t know if I have the perfect answer for you because we are still a relatively young field, right? And we’re still figuring out, we’re going through our teenage right now. And everyone has their own flavor of doing things, right? And me as a design leader, I’m learning from other leaders and listening to them and we’re all trying to solve similar problems, but approaching it slightly differently. I don’t think there is a cohesive way. The one thing I do feel we as design leaders need to be doing slightly differently is, when we meet at design events, wearing our nice black coats, and black shirts, and skinny jeans, and we get so excited, we share the work that every team is doing, but we don’t often talk about common challenges that we’re facing. Right. We are not as united in terms of a guild as we are in terms of expression, right? We need to get together and, and have discussions about similar challenges we are having. I, I feel that kind of approach needs to happen at conferences. But conferences end up being more of like show and tell less about collaborative, like let’s solve the common design problems because all the design capital is here right now, right? We don’t do that as much because we are siloed within our own function a little bit. I feel that that’s been my thought but other than that I think there are some design thinkers and leaders who are doing incredible work and I would steal that at a moment’s notice. I don’t care about, you know, I don’t care about self-expression if someone’s doing something, right? I’d love to borrow that idea and use it, which is what I’ve done over the years. Things that work. Peter: On that note, I’m wondering, what have you seen recently that you’ve found enlightening, illuminating, that you’ve gravitated towards? Is there some person or some, something out there that you’ve stolen from recently? Rajat: Yeah, I’ll give you a perfect example. It is so difficult to design a design org, right? I’m preaching to the choir here. It’s so difficult to design a perfect design org. There are so many different ways you can slice and dice it. So we tried two different ways. First one didn’t work. Second one did work and it worked to the level that we were able to bring in some incredible leaders from Google, Microsoft and other big companies to come and be very engaged working there. And that point, the leader at Bose reached out to me and said, I want to talk to you about design organizations, right? How do you build it? What are the challenges that you’re facing? So for me, I think the most recent one was not just sharing my thoughts around it, but learning. And in the process, he said, I would like you to come here. I didn’t know he was planning to leave, but I went there and I found that there are a lot of different ways to structure design orgs. And that’s an area that I’ve tried to learn from different leaders and figure out what is the best solution for that particular company, because there’s no one size fits all, but that’s one practice that I’ve kind of used. And then honestly, Jesse, what you just said, what I’m working on right now, from other leaders is, how do you measure success of design as a function and design as a organization, a function as in like expertise within a project and organizations like holistically, how are we performing, that we can increase our base by 10%, 20%. That clarity of measurement is something I’m trying to seek and understand and I’ve been in a lot of different talks and I’ve not yet found the perfect solution around that. Jesse: I don’t think anybody has. Peter, do you have anything else for us? Peter: I was going to ask but I think Rajat just kind of preempted it. I was going to ask like, you know, what, what are those things that you are looking to uncover, you just mentioned things like organization and metrics. I don’t know if there’s additional stuff, you know, you’ve been very you’ve been very honest, I think even a little vulnerable in, in terms of your journey as a design leader. And while you figured some stuff out, it’s clear that you’re still figuring stuff out. So is there anything else that you find yourself kind of pushing at the edges of as you’re trying to expand or extend your leadership space? Rajat: Yeah, again, I’m so happy you asked me this question because my personal journey is to answer this question. As a design leader, I’m trying to figure out for the last two decades, what makes someone creative? What makes a truly creative individual because most often I see that we as designers have standardized frameworks of thinking and I, I’m guilty of that, right? We have standard ways of research, standard ways of discovery, and translation and visualization, but what I’m finding, at least in the last 10 years working in big corporations, that disruptive innovation is not getting in through the door. Incremental improvements and incremental are seeing the light of the day. I am seeing more disruptive innovations happening at startups, right? And what is that creative thinking that is enabling? I mean, there are multiple hypotheses here. Yeah. Not only what is that creative thinking as a group that is leading people to Uber as an example to make strangers, to go sit in a stranger’s car, to have strangers come stay in your house and Airbnb, to binge watch on Netflix. What are they doing to create an environment of support and creativity where ideas which are truly disruptive with 10x, 100x growth are able to flourish? And how are they able to recruit those thinkers which are still having the capacity to not get burdened by process to the extent that they can only come up with incremental improvements and not look at the world so differently that they can make a dent in the universe. To me, that is what is really keeping me up because I’d like to be part of that change somewhere. Jesse: I love that vision. Rajat, thank you so much. Rajat: Thank you so much, Jesse. Jesse: If people want to find you on the internet, where can they find you? Rajat: They can find me on LinkedIn under my name. They can email me. There is an email address there and of course I am an avid photographer and traveler so they can find me on Instagram under my name because as I travel through my life, I try to capture moments a lot on Instagram. You can find me by my last name Shail and the letter Z–Shailz. You should be able to find me with on Instagram. Peter: Excellent. Jesse: Terrific. Thank you so much. For more FindingOurWay, visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com. If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design. Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.