Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is veteran Silicon Valley design and product strategy consultant Audrey Crane, who will share her perspective on the changing mandates for design among her clients, the power that consultants wield that in house teams don’t, and why sometimes the most effective design leaders are those who talk the least about design.

Peter: So Audrey, excited to have you here to work through some of the topics that Jesse and I have been discussing for a few episodes now, on kind of where things are going, for design, design leadership.

But before we dive into that, I think it would be helpful for our podcast audience who might not have met you, read you, heard of you, how do you introduce yourself? What do you do? How should people think of you out there in the world?

Audrey: Yeah. Well, so Audrey Crane, I’m a, partner at DesignMap. So we’re a consultancy. Do I say we’re a design consultancy? I don’t know. I think that’s one of the things we’re going to be talking. Let’s say product strategy, with some design support, company. So we’re San Francisco based. We’ve been around for 18 years, and we do a lot of B2B, B2B2C, like, complex product strategy. But I’ve been around for a long time. I was working at Netscape in the mid-90’s. So I consider myself, I flatter myself, a graybeard of Silicon Valley.

Peter: Does that mean you’ve been doing this work for almost 30 years? Um,

Audrey: That can’t be right. But I was super lucky to be, you know, at Netscape with Marty Cagan. With, I worked for, for Marty. I worked for Hugh Dubberley. I was in the room when Marc Andreessen first started talking about the famous “good product manager, bad product manager” stuff. So it was the olden times, but those people are, in a lot of ways, I think more relevant.

And I was super lucky to get to do that.

Like most theater majors, you know, just like somehow landing in the middle of Silicon Valley during the dot com boom of the late nineties. 

Jesse: Your company, is called DesignMap, but you hesitate to call your work design. And obviously there’s, there’s something going on in that. And I’m curious about just your own relationship to design yourself as a creative professional.

Audrey: I did study theater in college and I studied math as well. I studied a form of mathematics that’s like very theoretical. And so growing up, I think a lot of kids still are like, they’re good at math or they’re good at English. They’re good at one or the other. 

But theater in particular, as a creative outlet is really, really bounded, right? You have like the script and what you say and what other people say. And then on the other hand, the kind of math that I was doing, which was really like, by my senior year of college, we’re just writing proofs. Like there’s no numbers left anymore. And there’s actually a lot of intuition and creativity that goes into that. 

‘Cause like of all the things that we know to be true about whatever kind of math we’re doing, like, what’s the next thing that’s going to get me to where I want to go. Even to the point where I mean, this is like the nerdiest thing I could possibly say, but like reading proofs that gave me goosebumps because they were just like so elegant, you know, and, and so smartly put together.

And so when I graduated from college and I was like broke and happened to be able to, have done some tech work because my dad was an engineer, way in the olden days, I landed at Netscape. Solely because Hugh Dubberly saw my resume and was like, math and theater, like, that’s super weird. I got to meet this person.

And then I got to work for him. And through him, I found that this design thing, which for me, at least is like a perfect match of empathy and creativity, but also like problem solving within boundaries towards a particular goal. And so it, matched my brain pretty well, that for me is like the creativity of constraints is really, really fun. And design is a place where I think still, like, a lot of people don’t know that it exists, that you, don’t have to be just like a highly creative, quote, unquote, right brain person or the other.

Jesse: What’s your relationship to design these days in your practice?

Audrey: I think that you can apply a design process or design thinking, if you must, to pretty much anything. So a lot of times now the design work that I’m doing is like, this client really needs this thing and understanding what the thing is that they really need like that by itself is like a listening and learning process.

Sort of like when somebody goes to the doctor and says, I need this medicine. There’s a lot of questions to understand, like, what’s really going on and is this medicine really going to help you? Or is it something else? That and figuring out, like, what do we do that might help solve that problem, and can we do it within this timeframe and this budget, is actually like a pretty fun, creative process for me. It maybe sounds horrible and dry, but I really love it. And if we can’t help them, figuring out who can help them, and brokering that introduction. 

But at the end of the day, it’s still a problem. And I want to understand the problem and think through lots of different ways to solve it and figure out a path there. So that’s not to say that I don’t work on projects specifically. And sometimes I do, and that’s really fun. But a lot of times it’s more at that kind of second order, third order of design, if you like, from the, product. 

Now, is that strategy? I don’t know. Yeah.

Peter: Well, and, reflecting on something you said at the outset, where you weren’t sure what to call DesignMap, which has the word design in its name, but you’re like, are we a design consultancy anymore? Which, you know, Jesse and I started Adaptive Path in 2001, and we called ourselves a user experience agency, and we didn’t use the word design in how we defined our work for years, because of associations with that word that we didn’t feel were appropriate for us.

So let’s, get to that, you know, your company is called DesignMap, but you’re not sure if you’re a design consultancy. What’s up with that?

Audrey: OK. We are a design consultancy. So I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, but if we think about what the market wants, does the market want design? You know, I’m not sure that if, I just approached somebody and I said, Hey, we offer design services, that anybody in the market at the moment is going to be like, “Oh, great, I need design services. That’s what I need. I need design services.” Right? 

They might need help with stakeholder alignment. They might need help kind of articulating a vision. They might need help solving you know, a problem where the usage of a product has plateaued and they need it to improve. All of these are things that can be solved with design.

But I posted about this recently, and I think that what I’m seeing is that people are using the word design less, and it’s not just quote unquote, “speaking the language of the business,” which I think we’ve been talking about as a design profession for a while now, right?

It’s not just being articulate in you know, whatever, TAM, what’s the total addressable market, but actually just only using those words and design just happens to be the tool that we’re using to solve whatever problem or opportunity we’re talking about.

Peter: When you mentioned people are not using the word design anymore, who people are not using the word design anymore? Is it that prospective clients aren’t using the word design anymore? Is it the designers are wary of that word?

Audrey: Who’s the they? Yeah. I mean, I think famously Katrina Alcorn, like, really put her finger on it when she left IBM and said whatever my next job is, is going to have the word product in the title. I remember a part of what she said was, I feel like I’m doing so much of what is maybe traditionally considered product anyway, like I might as well take the title and have a bit more control and it’s almost like the word product is hard and the word design is soft, somehow. 

So I think that was kind of the first famous moment. But then I have a lot of, friends who are VPs of design and at DesignMap, we have a voice of the customer program where we pay a recruiter to recruit VPs of design. And we sit and we talk with them for an hour. We do this as like a regular practice, like taking our vitamins, as they say, right? 

And when I hear my friends talk about it, see decks from VPs of design, it’s so striking. And they don’t even point it out to me, but the word isn’t even there. Like, I, just saw a VP of design, it was her budget for next year and her proposed budget had foundations, and investing in foundational work, and acceleration and all these other things.

And I commented to her, you know, you’re a, she is a trained, like, dyed-in-the-wool career designer, like, and the word design doesn’t show up here. And she said, “Oh God, no, you know, absolutely not.” No, what this actually is, is it’s a design debt. What this thing over here is, is design systems and like heuristic review and improvements.

So she like almost code switched with me. But when I’m talking about investing money in my team and in external support, that’s not the word that I’m using. It’s super interesting. And there’s, something about all of these things, right? Like how many years have you heard designers complain that they are having to do product managers’ jobs?

Like not every designer and not every product manager, but I mean, I’m sure that I’ve heard designers talking about that for 15 years, right? And then, on top of that, this, not just being able to speak business-ese, but that’s all you’re speaking in, is really interesting to me.

Peter: So yesterday I was onsite at a company for their internal design celebration that very much used the word design. Public company, 84,000 employees, lot of hardware, manufacturing.

So when they talk design, they actually were talking a lot about industrial design. They had their Chief Product Officer show up at this event and talk about how he wants this business to be design-led. 

And I’m saying this not to disagree. I’m saying this to suggest, I think, the conversation is really scattered and lumpy. And in some contexts, design has become a dirty word or it has become minimized to mean production. And so like the leader that you were talking about, right, if they want to talk about stuff that isn’t pumping out assets for engineers to code, they have to use new language to get at what we used to call design or, you know, user experience practices.

But then there’s still other companies that are celebrating the opportunity of design and want to be design-led and talk about Apple as a standard bearer. And I guess I’m trying to make sense of, this polyphony around the concept of design.

This company that is celebrating design, when this Chief Product Officer talks about design, he had a fairly, I would say, narrow view of what it is. And he talked a lot about the emotional connection and the emotional engagement that design drives.

So, while you’re talking about how design can be a tool to help I don’t know, roadmaps and all this kind of strategic thinking and all, this leader is still seeing design as how do we create something that people love, in this kind of visceral, emotional way that feels very product-y, feels very, you know, Apple… 

Audrey: Like fonts and colors… 

Peter: Yes. As opposed to, like, what you were talking about, which is design as a means to solve all kinds of problems. 

Audrey: Articulate a strategic vision. 

Peter: Well, yeah, the opportunity of design thinking was this recognition that design is a set of practices that can be applied to literally any problem.

Audrey: Yeah. Well, were you surprised that the design celebration happened, that it was so design forward that the product, head of product talked about it that way? . . 

Peter: I was a little surprised. I mean, many companies still host internal design and user experience summits, right? And so, you know, I expect that community to come together. I was a little surprised that this Chief Product Officer took, I think, at least an hour out of their day to communicate to this group about the importance that he sees this group of people having for the future of the business and his commitment to it.

It was also interesting, you know, hearing how he talked about design in a way that was very, again, product-oriented and, frankly, kind of hardware oriented. Whereas this was a group of people who were mostly working on software. But what I reflected to the group when I spoke at this event, you know, listen to how your leadership is talking about design, right, and, what kind of purchase does that give you? How can you start with where they are in terms of that understanding of design and then, and then move them along? 

So there’s an opportunity there.

Audrey: Yeah. It’s interesting that they use the phrase design-led and also seem to talk about it just in, like, the product emotional appeal way. It’s very interesting. I’m super interested in the overlap of the Venn diagram between like designers and product managers or designers and engineers, or just, you know, designers and the rest of the world.

And you know, there’s so much designers talking to designers about design. I wish we talked more outside of that. It’s interesting though. I, I’m friends with Marty Cagan and I was at his book launch a couple of months ago for his latest book.

And, I think like the shorthand of it is that I actually think it might only be designers that are not wanting to use the design word. Right? Because I can’t think of any product leaders who have done that, or even really that know what’s going on.

And so when I chatted with Marty, and then I was lucky enough to have drinks with Dan Olsen as well. He runs like a big product leadership get together at Intuit on the peninsula…. I can’t remember where, but there was like no awareness about the big design freak out at all. 

And so I’m like, oh my gosh, like whole design teams are being let go, like amazing design leaders are looking for their next job for actually years. Like, designers are changing their titles from design leader to product leader. Like it’s a whole big thing. They weren’t aware of that. And I think that’s interesting, especially because those two folks, Dan and Marty, are like talking to everybody all the time. Right. 

So that was interesting. And also one of the things that Marty said, you can see the video of this in the talk that he gave at his book launch ,was I was just chatting with a CEO and he said to me there’s 200 product managers in this organization, and if I let them go tomorrow, I’m not sure that anything would be any different. I can’t tell you what it would be. 

And Marty was using that as like a, Hey, you guys, you got to pay attention and start doing great product management. To me, that sounds like what’s happened to some friends, frankly, where like the whole entire design team did get chopped off in places because, I don’t know, Elon Musk, like, I don’t know why there’s just this like, oh, we can let everybody go and we can still operate in the black, and so why not? 

Two points, I guess, right? One is maybe, like, trying not to use the D-word is maybe something that’s only happening in the design community and that other people aren’t aware of that or concerned about it. But that also maybe this is impacting other roles that have, you know, arguably potentially similarly squishy impacts on outcomes for businesses. I’m sure a product manager wouldn’t like to hear me say that, but…

Well, 

Jesse: it’s interesting to think about it from the product management point of view, because it’s true that if you look at the discourse, such as it is, on LinkedIn, if you look at what design leaders are talking about, they are constantly talking about improving the relationship with product and making the relationship with product successful.

If you look at what product leaders are talking about, they are almost never even referencing a relationship to design, never mind investing in strategies for improving that relationship. And so I find myself wondering about the cultures that both sides have now inherited, you know, in the 30 years since Netscape, that kind of bake in a bunch of assumptions and a bunch of expectations of the other side that are creating these blind spots because, yeah, seems impossible for all of this to be going down on the design side and the leadership in the product community, not even recognizing that it’s going on there.

Audrey: Having no idea. 

Jesse: Yeah. So I wonder about, like, what’s it going to take to build some bridges between these communities so that we can at least have that sense of mutual visibility.

Audrey: Gosh, I mean, I think that’s an amazing question, Jesse. I, you know, I’m in the Leading Design Slack channel and I’m in the Mind the Product Slack channel, and Mind the Product has, like, product and design, like, within there and nobody ever posts there. And similarly, there’s a similar channel in Leading Design, nobody ever posts there. 

And, you know, I mean, I think it’s great, Christian Crumlish wrote his book, Product Management for Designers. My book, Design for CEOs, is about, like, trying to talk to other people about the tangible value of design and just the basic language. I mean, hopefully neither of you have ever read that book, because it’s so 101-y, but what we were finding is that CEOs were asking us why wireframes didn’t have color in them, or saying, like, when are we going to get the design maps? Like, we just didn’t even have the most basic shared understanding of language and process.

But also, every time I go to a design conference, if there’s a non-designer speaking, like, that’s one of the most interesting talks, right? So, I don’t know why we don’t reach out more. 

But also, just talking about like product managers and designers working together, like, I sort of looked for a while for like, here’s a framework that we can say, this is what we expect of product managers and this is what we expect of designers. Like surely there’s a framework, right? And so I reached out to, I don’t know, 40 designers and I said, tell me the best thing that you ever got from a product manager and why you liked it. And I’m a pattern finder. I love models and concept maps. It’s like totally my jam for making sense of the world. 

And what came back was total chaos, just all over the place. Absolutely, I couldn’t find a pattern in it anywhere. And, I mean, the reflection that I had is that these are two individuals who have their own experience, their own, things they love, things they hate, strengths, weaknesses, training, expectations, and that kind of like three-in-a-box idea, or like dedicating teams that get to work together long term so that they can storm and norm is maybe the only way to do that because, there’s too many different things that need to be done at any moment in time, the product discovery and design and development release process and people are just too unique, and maybe we can’t do that. 

But, I agree with you, it seems very odd to me that there’s not more conversation across disciplines and, business, strategy, product, and we’re so sophisticated, I think design, I mean, you guys are giving PhD level talks at conferences, like we’re, we, I feel like we’re pretty good at it, you know, but what we’re not good at is, like, working across teams. And I really don’t know how to make that work better.

Peter: I find myself wondering… The anthropologist comes out in me, and how much of this is cultural and, and the cultures of design and design practice and design as a function. 

And I’m having trouble saying the culture of product management because I, think product management isn’t nearly as coherent a culture and a function as design, right? So many different paths into product management, so many different flavors of product management, depending on what kind of organization you’re in, right? To be a consumer product manager at a social media company is very different than to be a B2B product manager at an enterprise SaaS firm, or to be a product manager at a bank or whatever, like, I think there’s a less shared culture. 

But there’s something in terms of where folks are coming from, and then when they’re brought together, no work is being done to bridge those gaps. It’s just like, you got to work together and please start producing value tomorrow. 

Audrey: Right. And you got six weeks and then you’ll be on something else.

Peter: Right, And you mentioned storming and norming… There’s a whole category of assumptions I had…. So Jesse and I, you know, we worked at Adaptive Path. I left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011. And as I entered the world of in-house product building, this was the start of things like Spotify squad models and stuff that was written about in 2012, Amazon two-pizza teams was also at least kind of popularized in 2012. 

And I was under the assumption that like, Oh, when you go in house, you get this stable team of folks who are working on a problem together for, weeks, if not months, on end. 

And they’re no longer working on projects. That’s the bad old way. That’s an internal services model. They’re working on a program and a product, and they’re just always endeavoring to make it better. This is over 10 years ago. This was what I had been hearing as the prevailing model of…

Jesse: right, 

Peter: balanced teams, empowered teams, agile teams. And then you go in house and you’re like, no one is operating anything nearly like that.

Audrey: I mean, a few companies, but yeah. 

Peter: So few. 

Audrey: Yeah. Right. You got six weeks to do this and then you’ll be in the next thing. And, oh, by the way, you have 20 percent of your time to do it. And for whatever it’s worth, I think the kind of… “strategic sacrifice” is a phrase I learned from one of these VPs of design, I’m like, I’m just going to call bullshit. 

Like there’s no way that with 1/16th of their time, that this designer is doing anything except for going crazy and maybe getting complained about, right? So like, I’m just not going to resource it. And we all know that like an engineer or product manager or somebody somewhere was designing it anyway. But we’re pretending like this poor schlub is spending 1/16th of their time? Like, no. 

And I, agree with you. I mean, I’ve been internal too, and with our clients as well, we ask them these questions, but it’s just like a resourcing shell game. I mean, I agree with you about the differences between the design and the product culture, but we’re kind of all doing the same thing, right? We’re, like, trying to help somebody somewhere do something with this company, product, or service.

And we’re telling and testing stories about how we’re going to do that. Our tool for storytelling is Figma, their tool for storytelling is Excel, but otherwise, you know, I just don’t think it’s that different.

A big question is like, how are people incented in the organization, right?

Jesse: Yeah. When Peter was talking about the cultural diffusion in product management, I think it largely has to do with the very diverse range of incentives that exist in product management, depending on the category, depending on the product space, depending on the problem space.

Whereas design seems to have some kind of sense of its own center in a way. It has a sense of purpose in the world beyond what somebody told us it was, you know?

Audrey: I mean, it would be super interesting to try to map out the product management culture. I think it’s, it’s easy to say from the outside, like, Oh, there’s no real culture. It’s very diverse. 

Jesse: Yeah, of course. 

Audrey: But when I hear you say, Jesse, like we have a center, I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking of, but certainly one that I could think folks might go to is like, we are the advocates for the user, right?

That’s our role. I’ve heard product managers say, I do not ever want to hear a designer say that ever again. We are all advocates for the user. Like I’m not anti-user. That’s what we’re all trying to do. You guys don’t own that.

Peter: But then I hear one of my client’s Chief Product Officer, where I was helping him hire a VP of Design, saw Design’s primary role as the voice of the customer within the product development process, right? And so that’s again, like. there’s, not an agreement or alignment more within product.

All designers see their responsibility as being a voice of the customer and a representative of the user in the process. 

Within product. Some do, some don’t. 

Audrey: It might be to meet a deadline.

Peter: Some think it’s a good thing to delegate it, right? Like it’s not like they don’t think the customer matters, but they’re like, well, the product person’s got so many things to deal with, thus, the designer is the one who’s best responsible for that right? I don’t think it’s out of neglect or disinterest. It’s, how do we get all these people to get things done without overwhelming them? 

Audrey: Yeah. I think that that product manager was reacting to the idea that, like, there’s some high ground that the designer could stand on, or they had a veto because they were the advocate for the user versus the product. I think it’d be, like, super fun to have a conference where engineers and product managers and designers came and all the talks were my favorite, or my worst, experience with other disciplines. And that would be really interesting. And at least we’d be like, listening more, you know, outside of our little talking bubble.

Jesse: You know, in your client work, you have the opportunity to directly observe both design leaders and product leaders as they do what they do in organizations. And I wonder what you’ve seen has helped design leaders have that broader influence and drive that broader vision of what design has to offer. What’s helping design leaders be successful as cross-functional partners?

Audrey: I think a lot of “yes, and”-ing, Ooh, I, you know, kind of being opportunistic about ways that they can help. And I don’t want to say being nice to work with, but I honestly have, heard and seen designers say, I used to be an asshole, and now I just try to be nice to work with, that’s what I tried to do. And then if there’s an opportunity where I can help, then I do. 

And one person in particular was talking about like, we used to just like really focus on the products and just like, we were just product design, but I started to see opportunities where people are having trouble making decisions or getting alignment or just making time for whatever. And so I started to offer to help. And this is a VP of design saying, like, can I facilitate a workshop for you? Like, I would be happy to help. 

And these conversations, they were, I think, again, a bit opportunistic about, like, these like more senior strategic level conversations, only casting themselves in the role of facilitator, but being in the room, being perceived as helpful, perceived as being able to support progress.

And at the same time, like, that person sort of grew that into almost like a practice inside of their organization, where folks would come to him and say, Hey, we’re having trouble with this, can you, like, lend me somebody to help with this conversation? 

And so he’s doing a bit less product design, and at least, has a bit more visibility into more strategic conversations. 

So there’s two parts to that. One is like the gatekeeping, fighting, you know, for the seat at the table. That language and that stance is gone. They’re like nice to work with.

And then just looking for opportunities to help in a way that gives them more influence and visibility in the organization. Which also I wrote about it on LinkedIn and, a couple of people were like, Oh, so acting like grownups is what you’re saying. 

Peter: I was about to say like, how, who the fuck were we, that we could show up as if our shit didn’t stink and expect people to just like engage with us? Like, if that’s how people are showing up, then yes, no kidding design is going to be excluded. 

Audrey: But didn’t you work in organizations or haven’t you seen organizations… like I certainly did, and then what happens is like the product manager tries to go off piece, and like hire their own designer because it’s so hard to get a resource, and you have to go through this central blah, blah, blah, and they get in trouble for that too, and it’s just, it’s really like controlling and there’s the whole bottleneck thing and like, but we did, we did act like that. Some of us. Sometimes, probably not me or you guys, but you know.

Jesse: Well, no, I mean, I think that it’s a cultural pitfall, really, of the entire field. I think that, you know, if you come up as a practitioner, you have to invest a bit of your ego in your work. You have to be willing to stand behind it and defend it and argue in favor of a point of view just to be successful at the design part.

Then you get into design leadership and that same stance kind of gets carried forward. Only now it’s not about the craft anymore. It’s about strategic direction, and things like that, where the weight that you carry in the room is a little bit different, right? Once you’ve kind of reached that leadership level, and the ego that served you in shoring you up to defend your creative ideas is now a disservice because it, it’s a wall between you and your partners.

Audrey: What I love about working with designers who have been to design school, honestly, is that they spend four years getting criticized. And so they have like, a tenuous relationship with their work, where it’s not that they don’t care, and it’s not that they don’t feel good about it, but also there’s like a separation, and I flatter myself that being a theater major, I also got criticized for four years, but I hadn’t thought of it the way that you’re talking about it Jesse, and I think it’s interesting and there’s got to be some merit in that. 

You’re putting yourself out there in a way that nobody else in the room would be willing to do, right? How many times are people like, I don’t want to draw on the whiteboard, much less all this, right? And it’s just, it’s very different from like what happens in a code review, for example. 

I also think, like, the profession is just so new that we had to spend some years being like, no, no, no, we’re here. We’re here and we do stuff and the stuff that we do is important and helpful. We want to do it. Like it’s important. What I do is important and I can help the company. And I’m going to keep saying that over and over and over and over and over again. And it just got kind of like rigid, like fighting for his seat at the table.

And now maybe we’re here. And if we want to stay here, then we got to act like grownups. 

I mean, I remember the AIGA was, like, involved and wanting to talk about like, what are all the specific titles and what’s the difference between user interface and user experience and interaction design and wait, interface design, wait, and I just went in a whole circle. 

I was at a conference once, this is probably in the early 2000s, where there were like three talks and all of them, it was a design conference, all the talks had like a Nelson clock, like, you know, that iconic Nelson clock with a big circle in the middle and then the balls on the outside. And each talk was like, My role, insert role here, information architecture is the center of the design universe. And then the next one was like, user experience is the center of the design universe.

So I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors with I mean, especially like UX, UI, like my gosh, like I can’t tell you how many times people say, oh, we need a UX/UI designer. And I’m like, hmm. So you would think that I would know what you’re talking about, but I actually have no idea what you’re talking about when you say you need a UX/UI designer.

So some clarity sounds good. And you’re right, like who would want to say like, no, I just do like digital product design. I don’t do strategy. That’s not me. That’s not what I do. Like all consultancies that I know of, that are more than a person or two, have been in decline for the last two years.

So there are fewer people coming and asking these questions. So if I tick off, like, the last five clients that came to us, who are not heads of design, one person has a giant B2B product that has been around for 10 years and the usage has plateaued and they wanted to get better. So I’m very glad that they’re coming to a design consultancy for that.

One, similarly, kind of, like, how to go with an IT product that, basically, like, customers are hating. And so we’re picking some more key workflows and obviously, like, looking at customer support calls and things like that. Another one is a head of product where they have a homepage and then this wild hare, that’s like a favorite idea of the C-suite, is competing basically with the homepage, and he’s like, I don’t know how to make sense of these, and it is a pretty strategic conversation, right? It’s not just like, what do they look like? But who are they for? And why would they use them? And I’m kind of stuck with this pet project and I need to make sense of it so that it doesn’t suck, because I have to. 

I don’t know if you can draw any conclusions from what I just rattled off there.

One is a regional bank who’s moving off of the white label stuff that they use. So, from their point of view, they have a product team. Like they have a CIO, not a CTO. They have product managers who are really product owners that work for the CIO. They have two designers that work, actually, for the marketing team. And they’re kind of ready to move into, like, rolling their own products. 

But even though, obviously, they have digital services, it’s like a digital transformation problem, like the whole organization needs to change. So they came to us to like design the product, but what we’re talking to them about is like, you’re not going to, this isn’t going to work, and we’re not just going to give you a, like, a prototype that you’re not going to be able to build.

So it’s kind of all over the place. But a lot of what we’re doing, actually, I can draw one conclusion is we’re doing more and more, like, vision work, where either there’s one guy, let’s say he’s a founder and he used to be able to get all of his employees in a room and get them excited. 

Now he can’t do that anymore. And he has a clear vision of where he wants to go, but he can’t articulate it and get people excited about it. Or there were a bunch of acquisitions and now we’ve got to figure out like how the whole is going to be greater than the sum of its parts. And so there’s, like, a somewhere that we need to be in a year or two or three, and we want to get clear on where we want to be, and we need to communicate where we want to be. 

So you could call that a visiontype if you want, like some of it is so near term that it’s a prototype and it’s, I flatter myself maybe, that it’s kind of what you would get from a management consultant that you trusted, where it’s like, we talked to customers, we talked to stakeholders, we looked at the competitive landscape, we’ve got these eight bullet points. And then like everybody nods because they’re just bullet points, right? 

But then we actually do a prototype that illustrates where those show up and that difference between, like, quote unquote “strategy,” which I think would just leave off at the bullet points, and like design, where we can make it tangible and you can click through like how that key insight shows up in the product and shows up for the customers. You can touch it and feel it and get excited about it. You could show it to your CEO or your board or your customers. 

Like that is something that we’re getting more traction around and people are more interested in. And also is something that I think design is uniquely qualified to do, because that tangible bit is really important.

Jesse: It’s interesting that you bring up this tension, because it really does kind of circle back to what I think of as the original promise of user experience design, when that term came to the fore, which was the idea that there was an opportunity in the synergy between the conceptualizing, the ideation and the execution.

And if you had that unified as a single function, that there was value to be gained there, that there were better outcomes at the end of it. If the people who did that early conceptualizing were the same ones who ultimately specified what shipped. I can see that in the context that you’re talking about still absolutely being a viable value proposition for a lot of in-house teams that hasn’t really been proven out.

And in fact, their structures have evolved to a place where there isn’t really space for the people who are responsible for shipping your pixels to participate in ideation. We don’t have the processes for it. We don’t, we literally haven’t hired the right people for it. And so I’m wondering about what you see as the future prospect of that value proposition.

Audrey: Yeah, that’s a drag. I, you know, for sure have been in-house and it’s, awful, right, when you’re in house, you probably even have ideas, right, that’s the kind of work that you want to do. 

But then honestly, the mere fact that dollars are being spent outside is what makes it possible because it seems like we can say that this is a priority until the cows come home, but as soon as we see a highly paid consultants invoice, or even a moderately paid or a lowly paid consultants invoice, like somehow those dollars feel different. It gets prioritized. You get time with the stakeholders that you need to meet with. It gets time boxed, right? It doesn’t get, like, drug out because, oh, we have these internal resources on it, but now there’s this feature and this customer is demanding it and they have to go over there and it just like fizzles out. 

It’s a bummer and I, I’m quite sensitive to it, because I have been internal, and my take is, like, strategy without implementation is just bullshit and nobody wants to be in the bullshit business, right? But I have been internal and gotten a strategy with no thought, not a second thought to whether we could actually implement that.

Jesse: Mm-Hmm.

Audrey: And then they got to go and they didn’t have to live with it. And it’s not a good position to be in. You know, there’s at least two things that can make that different. One is, is working with a consultant who can point you to people who have received their deliverables. And because , we can all say, Oh yeah, no, the internal team will be highly involved and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But until you can hear the impact on the internal team, like you don’t really know. So that’s one part is there can be like really great co-creation, skills exchange, and also the work that the external consultant does is worth so much more to the organization if somebody internal was there and understands why the decisions were made and, you know, can really steward the work. So there’s a lot more value there. 

And then I think the other bit is, I do see VPs of design, like the guy I was talking about before, that’s kind of started up like a little, like innovation facilitation service internally. Like, I’m not saying, like, spin up a greenhouse or anything, like, incubator. I’m not saying that at all, but I’m saying, like, provide an internal service, which is an innovation service. And there’s all kinds of complicated questions about how that gets budgeted and how that budget is managed. But, you know, I definitely have seen teams do that sometimes, like, even with their own brand and stuff, and they market themselves internally to the organization. And it’s sort of an agency model, but they’re in there. It’s a lot more porous because designers can come into those teams or go out of those teams and they’re still there when you’re trying to implement.

They haven’t taken off to the next client or whatever.

Jesse: Right. 

Audrey: Yeah Well, I see you just like picked up what I put down and ran all the way to the end with it, ’cause sometimes we’re the ones receiving what the management’s consultant left the client with, right? Like the management consultant is like, here you go. You will be making 250 million by this time next year. Bye. 

And then they’re like, Oh shit. Like, I don’t know what to do with this. And so we come and we help with that. And it’s not the most pleasant experience ever. 

And then I go back and I talk to these management consultants and I say, Hey, do you want to see what we did with what you left here and like, and how it went, you know? ‘Cause I always want to know, like, I always want to know the impact of the work that we do. And they usually say yes. And we have those conversations and it baffles me that they don’t do that stuff, but surely some of them must, I just haven’t seen it. What I’ve seen mostly are like spreadsheets and feature lists and deadlines.

And then, you know, they’re like, here’s your certainty. Like you’ve paid them for certainty and they’ve given you certainty. If you release this list of features by this date, the TAM is this. And if you get X percent of the TAM, here are the dollars. 

So I don’t see management consultants do that. I don’t understand why. It definitely is a lot more compelling to click through an interface than to look at a spreadsheet. I don’t know. I guess if you’re the board, maybe that’s not true. But then also management consultants don’t have a very good reputation. But, you know, McKinsey has a design arm, right? Maybe they do that stuff. I don’t know. I don’t think that they have a very good reputation amongst anybody below the C suite. 

The whole point of Marty’s last book, right? It was like that PDE were coming to him and saying, we want to work like these empowered teams, but we can’t because we just are in an environment in which it’s not possible. And so how can we change that environment?

And that’s why he wrote the book. You know, he didn’t get done with Empowered and say, I know what my next book will be, like, he got done with Empowered and then he listens. I think he spends like four hours a day answering emails and on the phone with people. So he’s really got an ear to the ground. 

So I say that, and then I’ll go back to describing that, like we can’t do that with internal teams because they’ll get sucked away, you know. 

And some organizations that do this successfully, they manage their budget that way. And they say, okay, we’re gonna spend this money, meaning these people’s resources, it’s allocated for this quarter to that. And it’s not going to this over here. Like we’ve made that the stuff that we’re not going to do. And that’s hard to do if you’re swallowing an elephant, especially, right, if it’s like, what’s our three year vision. You know, we don’t need that long term.

So I think of like a snake that’s swallowed an elephant. So we’ve got this big hump. And are we going to carve that out of our features and releases, or are we going to get somebody else to swallow the elephant that we can just let go. But I think there’s a huge amount of value in swallowing it internally.

That metaphor went further than… swallowing the elephant with an internal team, because they get to do that stuff. It’s fun. It keeps them engaged. They’re invested in the long term health of the business. You know, again, it’s vitally critical that the external team is working closely with the internal team so that you don’t get this, like, you guys are crazy. We can’t do this. We’re not doing this. There’s a hundred things that you haven’t thought through, and how you know that you’ve brought in a consultant that’s not going to do that stuff is an interesting question for another podcast, I guess.

Jesse: Audrey what is one question that is foremost on your mind as we enter this next phase?

Audrey: I’m really curious to see how and where the decline in investment in design, that I think is happening, shows up. Like, maybe the recent Sonos release was the canary in the coal mine. I don’t know if you guys read about that. Yeah. But we’ve been saying, and I said it in the book, right, design is there to have a positive impact on the business. And if we lay off a bunch of designers and design teams, then the inverse should be true, right? You don’t have designers. And so there’s going to be a negative impact on the business, but how and where that first starts to show up and we notice and can… not point to it, but reference it as like, Oh, this is where we had the most immediate impact or the lack of design had the most immediate impact, is something I’m really thinking about, or cover your ears, it doesn’t happen.

Jesse: Mm hmm. 

Audrey: In that, like, Oh, we, let all these designers go and like, nothing happened. It was fine.

Jesse: Well, I guess we’ll all find out together. Audrey, thank you so much for being with us.

Audrey: It was absolutely my pleasure. I’m so excited to get to do this with you guys. Thank you for having me.

Jesse: Audrey, if people want to connect with you and your work, how can they do that?

Audrey: They can go to designmap.com or they can email me, Audrey at designmap. com. Connect on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to chat. I’m really interested in cross functional conversations, especially about all of this stuff. So please reach out.

Jesse: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Peter: Yes. Thank you.

Audrey: My pleasure.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. On today’s show, we’re joined by Gaurav Mathur, VP of Design for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart. He’ll share with us his perspective on the big issues facing design leaders in India today, including hiring and training for junior designers, as well as design leaders making the case for the business impact of design, and the opportunities for design-led startups in the Indian market.

Peter: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Gaurav: Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jesse, for having me here. I’ve been a follower since Adaptive Path, and it’s wonderful to be speaking with both of you.

Peter: Oh, awesome. 

Jesse: Thank you so much.

Peter: It would be good to get a sense of who you are and what you do. So, how do you introduce yourself and how do you talk about your career?

Gaurav: Sure. So currently, I’m the VP of Design at Flipkart. So Flipkart is a e-commerce company in India. Before Flipkart, I headed design for Myntra. Myntra is also an e-commerce company, but focuses on fashion and lifestyle. And it also happens to be a Flipkart Group company. So I have been in the e-commerce domain for probably, like, nine years or so now, and before that I worked with the SaaS division of Citrix.

The SaaS division used to make products like GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, et cetera. I also had a brief entrepreneurial journey where I was the co-founder of a design company and we were providing design services, to get our bread and butter essentially, but also building some educational products on the site.

I studied design and architecture a long time ago. So I have been a designer at heart.

Peter: Excellent. Let’s focus on your more recent experience, both Myntra and Flipkart. One of the reasons we were interested in speaking with you is, you know, our viewpoint is very North American. So, I sometimes work with companies that have design teams in India, cause they’ve got some development teams in India, but they’re usually still like doing design for a North American or European audience.

And I know with Myntra and Flipkart, you’re really focused on working within the Indian market. So , tell us a little bit more about these businesses and what your role is, specifically let’s say with Flipkart, leading design there.

Gaurav: Sure. So Flipkart is a horizontal e-commerce platform, and it’s a marketplace that allows sellers to come on board and sell all kinds of products. We categorize these products under categories like fashion, beauty, electronics, mobiles, large air conditioners, refrigerators, et cetera. And Flipkart also manages the supply chain, warehouses, logistics, and the last mile delivery of products so that we can deliver a better customer experience overall.

So the design team at Flipkart has the product designers, or UX designers essentially, that work across all kinds of products. We also have a visual design team that works on visual merchandising for various category stores. This team also manages the design of sale events. We have a UX research team, and we’ve recently integrated the market research function, so that we are able to create a unified research and insights op for the company. 

Peter: And that’s within your team? 

Gaurav: Yeah, that’s all within the design team. We call it the One Design Team at Flipkart. Besides this, we also have a small content team, because Flipkart is available in 11 other languages, 11 Indian languages besides English. So there’s a bunch of content work that we do, and I feel that my primary role is essentially to act as an orchestrator for this multidisciplinary org.

And I also engage with product and business leaders in the company to achieve org goals.

Peter: How many people are in your org?

Gaurav: We are about 100… 110 people across UX, visual design, research and content.

Peter: So you have a little over a hundred folks in your org. It sounds like you’re designing for all the audiences in this marketplace, the merchant side, the seller side, internal. 

You mentioned this one design team. Has that always been the case or, has it kind of evolved to this single unified design organization over time?

Gaurav: Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think it has evolved over time. So when I joined, for example, the team that works on the seller platforms was not part of this team, and we eventually integrated it. And that’s been a process, I think, it’s been a journey of integrating different parts into a single One design org.

So we think of users in three broad buckets. The first is shoppers that come on Flipkart to buy products. And the experience that we give to our shoppers is primarily on mobile devices because that’s where most Indians shop. They shop on mobile devices, not so much on the desktop website. So that’s a large, large base that we cater to. 

The second set of products that we build are for sellers. And this is essentially our seller platform where sellers come and manage their listings, their catalog. They’re able to place ads, configure offers, et cetera. 

The third set of users are essentially the partners that work in warehouses, in the logistic space, and the delivery partners that manage the last mile delivery. So we create a lot of products that get used in the warehouses also apps for the delivery agents. So these are products that get used across the supply chain.

And in terms of the teams we have a part of the product design team that focuses on the B2C experience. So it builds all the features and products in our mobile apps and on the mobile website as well as on the desktop website. And then we have a team that works on the B2B or the enterprise product. So these are products that the sellers use and our partners use. 

So my time is split across these teams. I just love to get into the details of what we are building. And the design details, so I’m really passionate about solving navigation, interaction design, and visual design. So I have time set up in my calendar review all the key projects that are happening across all these products.

Jesse: In such a complex environment, what do you think is important for design to advocate for?

Gaurav: Yeah, I think both these areas have slightly different kinds of goals. So when we think of shoppers, I think we want to deliver a very, very delightful experience to them. We want to ease their shopping journey. We want them to find the products fairly quickly, and get to the right set of products with ease, and people come with very specific requirements. Sometimes a person may have a very specific requirements and sometimes they may just be window shopping. So we need to cater to all these kinds of users. 

When we think of enterprise products, I think the primary goal is to just make them really, really efficient. So think of someone whose product’s at the warehouse, and putting the label and then just getting them ready to be shipped. Now, this is a very repetitive task, and if you’re able to shave off even those few seconds for this person, we just make the whole process very efficient.

Jesse: What do you see is your role as design leader in creating the environment where these kinds of experiences can be delivered?

Gaurav: Yeah, I think, building a really competent design team, I think is the first goal that I have. And also growing this team. It’s not just enough to build a team, but then to grow this team and grow the people in this team as well. Also, to facilitate or to kind of bring together people from different domains together.

So, for example, if you’re solving for grocery, we may have a product designer looking at grocery. We may also have a visual designer looking at grocery we’ll also have a researcher looking at grocery. So getting this pod created and facilitating this journey with the product managers and with the engineers so that we are able to build and deliver a really high quality product.

I think my job comes into play in different kinds of forms. I also want the design team to do a lot of innovation, and I call it design-led innovation. So I believe designers are at the right intersection because they are able to understand user needs fairly well and then they’re also able to visualize what the product could be.

And so therefore, they could be these facilitators, or the catalyst for driving innovation in the org. And therefore, as one of the north stars that I’ve set for the design team, design-led innovation is also one of them. We also want to build our reputation within the org through the work that we do and through the impact that we create.

So I think, just like I said, like just orchestrating and facilitating some of these becomes a very critical area for me to focus on. Besides this, obviously, like engaging with the product and business leaders is the other area that I kind of spend a lot of time. So we have product leaders that work across these products and just within the app we have multiple product managers looking at, for example, how do we acquire new users, retain them? How do we facilitate journeys across categories? How do we optimize our core shopping funnel, et cetera? so just working with them, understanding their strategic areas of investment and aligning the design team’s work with these strategic areas becomes a goal.

Jesse: So it sounds like you’ve been able to build up this really operationally robust design function, this really fairly mature design function. You’ve got a range of different design capabilities from visual design through to research. Those capabilities are being integrated in meaningful ways that are kind of driving this broader impact.

It feels like what you’re describing is a fairly mature state for a design team. I wonder about what it took to get to that place to bring the business along with, or maybe just to capitalize on, the opportunities that presented themselves to demonstrate the value to make the case for a robust mature design function like this.

Gaurav: Yeah, I think I have to give credit to a lot of consumer apps that kind of exist out there. And they’ve set a really high bar for design in the industry. Specifically, if you look at the consumer Internet industry, the design bar is fairly high. And so design is today a very well recognized function in these orgs.

So the role of evangelizing is kind of come down for me. I don’t have to really sell design. We get requests from product managers, from business teams to go and dig deeper into specific areas and solve for them in a better way. 

But I think why that part has been easier, I think, influencing some of the decisions from a very customer centric view has been the focus area. And I think within the tech function, if I look at, for example, product management and engineering they are very familiar with how design operates and they collaborate with us day in and day out in building and shipping products. 

But as I move away from the tech team, I feel that the awareness of design kind of slightly goes down. And specifically, when I talked to some of the business leaders they may not be as aware as, for example, a product manager about the role of design. And for awareness building, in the past I’ve just put the work out there and we’ve done it in different ways. We’ve done it in a format of a road show, for example, we’ve also done it in the form of just a UX open house where we would transparently share the work that we are doing as the design team and let people come in view this work, comment on it, critique it, give their feedback and in the process we are able to build partners across the org, and once they see what design can bring to the table, and how design could impact their objectives, how it could enable their functions, they’re fairly eager to cooperate and collaborate, and also invest in both design and research.

Peter: Where are you located within the organization, within the org chart? To whom are you reporting and who are your partners?

Gaurav: So I’m part of the larger tech team at Flipkart. I report to the chief product and technology officer at Flipkart, and my peers are some of the other product and engineering leaders in the org. So there are different views that look at different kinds of products that we’re building, like for shoppers or sellers for partners.

And my stakeholders would primarily be the product managers and engineers, but also the business leaders. And these business leaders primarily drive category functions. So they could be leaders leading one or more categories. For example, fashion or mobiles and electronics. 

Peter: You mentioned how you’re wanting to show impact, build a reputation and showing impact, but a challenge that design teams often have is demonstrating impact of their own accord, right? Because typically design’s value is realized through partnership and collaboration.

So I’m wondering how you navigated that. If your boss, the CPTO has specific expectations of you and design that you are held accountable for, like, you know, this is something we hear from a lot of design leaders, which is around, how do I demonstrate value? How do I show my impact?

Like what has that journey been like for you and clarifying design’s distinct impact?

Gaurav: Yeah. So I’m accountable for certain common company level metrics, for example. And these metrics are around customer and engagement. And also some new growth areas. The second area that I’m accountable for are a number of product metrics. And I kind of co-shared metrics with the product team members who are running some of these strategic initiatives and experiments.

And then third are like the people goals that include just the team health, how are we growing and retaining people, things like that. I also have some like more inward looking goals as part of the design team. And these tend to be around like driving more efficiency within the design team with the design system that we’re building, getting the design system adopted across different parts of the product.

And since it’s a fairly large product, the adoption is not a very straightforward activity. So we look for opportunities, you know, whenever we are updating a part of the product, we also adopt the new design system. There are also responsibilities around enabling research. And getting research to influence some of the key decisions in the org.

So there are different kinds of activities that the research team does and kind of leads ahead. We evaluate our products, but we also do some formative work, and influence the product roadmaps.

Jesse: Influencing the product roadmaps is one of these things that we hear from design leaders over and over again, that they are desperate to try to find some way to create in their organizations. And I’m curious about your thoughts about how to create that influence over the product roadmap, where is it appropriate for design to be leaning in and contributing toward these strategic decisions that, in a lot of people’s minds, technically sit outside the domain of design.

Gaurav: Interesting question. So, I don’t think there is one way to look at it. I think different products are at different points in their journey. And there are different kinds of opportunities to influence them. So, for example, if you are making incremental changes on a product, I think a lot of influencing happens in the way the designers and product managers collaborate and shape it together. 

If you’re looking at something that’s fairly new, a new initiative, something we’ve not done before, I think a lot of influencing can be done through research work and through some of the early prototyping work that we do and validate with our customers. So I think there are just different kinds of models that work in different situations.

But broadly having this thought of influencing and representing the customers in every discussion. Having that thought at the back of your minds, as a designer in these discussions, really. 

Another area that I’ve often found where designers play a key role is kind of safeguarding the customer interests and also safeguarding the design to some extent. We, we often get into discussions about where all can we highlight the offers that we have on different products? What’s the right space? What’s the right kind of tonality for it? How large should it be, et cetera. And that’s another area where I feel designers play a key role, in safeguarding the experience

Jesse: I think one of the challenges in that is engaging with audiences who don’t necessarily have design as a language, and helping them see, honestly, sometimes just see the difference between two different design directions and to be able to help them see the potential impact of that. How do you support and elevate your teams in their ability to build those bridges with people who don’t necessarily share the same language, so to speak, of design?

Gaurav: I don’t think we’ve done anything special here. I think a lot of the design awareness gets created through the discussions that we are part of, and how we present the designs, how we present the customer viewpoints. But we’ve not looked at special workshops, training programs or design thinking workshops, anything of that sort, in the organization. It’s just the collaborative style of working that kind of leads to this.

Jesse: So you keep, kind of, keeping it alive day to day, rather than kind of making these big bold statements with these big training programs or initiatives and so forth.

Peter: But kind of to that point, something I’ve been wondering is the purview of design. You know, you mentioned it’s a unified design team, one design team, product design, visual design, both UX research and market research, which to me suggests there’s a potential for design to be even broader than your boss’s organization.

Like, there could be touchpoints outside of product and technology. Maybe I’m mistaken, but, given the complexity of the ecosystem that Flipkart is operating in, there’s a lot of potential for design as a practice to influence all kinds of things, to influence… you mentioned last mile, it could be even potentially real world customer facing interactions or something, which might not be part of, you know, a product and technology group.

And I’m just wondering how you see the scope of all the things that design could touch. Are you fairly circumscribed within technology, or are you, you know, working on things outside of what would be considered typical product and technology?

Gaurav: Yeah. Well, I think if you look at purely from a product perspective and the kind of products we are building, then they tend to remain in the tech space largely. But if you look at some of the interactions that we have with our customers, so, for example, researchers and designers together often run researches with our CX teams, and we reach out to customers through them.

We go and look at how the warehouse operations work, how the delivery partners are delivering, the kind of challenges that they have, when they are operating in different kinds of environments. Tier Two cities are very different from metros in India. And what kind of challenges do these people have in navigating through the day?

So designers do go out and interact with a varied set of users. All the three sets that I mentioned earlier. But when it comes to building products, I think it still remains in the purview of what the larger tech team does at Flipkart. We do interact heavily with our business teams. We understand how they work with some of our suppliers, sellers as well.

And, what are their goals? How are they meeting their P&L goals? And we figured out innovative ways of kind of working together in this journey.

Peter: Earlier, you mentioned design-led innovation, which was a goal for you, an objective that you’ve set for the team. And I’m wondering, like, literally how that works in terms of what is necessary to make a space for your team to propose, new opportunities, new solutions, right, that might not be on anyone’s roadmap yet, right? Are you able to peel away a group of people for two or three months to have them work on something? 

Like, there’s an investment there that has to be made, right? If people are working on design-led innovation, they’re not working on the next iteration of the product experience. So like, how do you make the space to enable that and, get whatever approvals you need from your boss or whomever in recognizing that, that is a worthwhile effort?

Gaurav: Sure. So I actually feel that a lot of innovation comes when designers actually spend a lot of time with the problem at hand. So for example, if I’m a designer working on a specific project at Flipkart. And if I’m able to wrap my head around that problem together with the researcher, then I may have unique insights that will help me innovate much faster than what the rest of the org is kind of thinking about at this time.

We do create some special time as well for designers. We do what we internally call as a design jam. So this is just, it’s like a hackathon, but for designers. We give time and space to designers to come up with new ideas. We ran this one year and then we also realized that there is also like a tech hackathon that happens at Flipkart.

And so the next year, we ran this before the tech hackathon so that some of these design ideas could then feed into the tech hackathon. With that kind of a process, we are able to see something end to end. We are able to see something that got started in the design hackathon, but also got carried forward in the tech hackathon, and we were able to build a POC out for people to play with.

And once it’s tangible, people are able to react to it a little better and it also has a higher potential to to see the light of the day in the hands of the customers. So that’s an activity that we’ve been doing every year now. And it’s been quite successful so far.

Jesse: So, you know, it’s interesting what we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years from design leaders especially in North America and Europe, but I would say also to some extent in South America and in Asia as well, we’ve been hearing a lot about kind of a shift in the way the design is valued, a shift in the way the design is perceived in these organizations, and a shift in the way the design is approached in these organizations.

And it’s interesting to hear you talk about innovation, reflecting a point of view that, honestly, I think has been a mainstream point of view within the user experience community at least for a long time, which is the idea that the people who are really deeply immersed in the use cases, the people who are really in there, sleeves rolled up, crafting the interfaces are going to be your best source for insight for new opportunities to serve those audiences, because that immersion gives them a view on the problem that an external, you know, innovation lab jumping in for the first time is never going to have. 

However I feel like what I’m hearing from a lot of people is a shift away from that as a value proposition, and toward a scope of the design role that stays much more focused on delivery.

And I’m curious about what you’re seeing in the landscape in India right now, in terms of approaches to design, ways that other organizations are managing design, and where are things going these days in how design is being framed among Indian companies.

Gaurav: Great question. So when I look at the landscape in India, I, I see designers working in three kinds of companies 

The first would be companies that are building products for India from India. These are essentially product-led organizations, building core products. The second would be what are called as GCCs or Global Capability Centers. And these are essentially multinational orgs, large companies that have setups in India to tap into the rich talent pool in India. And the third would be tech and design service orgs. So these traditionally provide services to other companies. And they also employ a large set of. Designers. 

I think the work kind of differs in each of these buckets. I think the first two that I spoke about, like companies that are building products out of India and GCCs, have a very similar kind of a profile, I would say. They’re essentially focused on scaling and building product. And very similar kinds of roles exist in these organizations. you would typically have product designers, researchers, UX content writers, et cetera. I feel that the, scope of innovation also kind of varies, with the kinds of responsibilities that each of these orgs have in India.

I feel that the largest opportunity for innovation lies with the startups in India, startups that are trying to build new products, grounds up. So these are zero-to-one initiatives. And I think here the designers have the opportunities to work with the founders and the key stakeholders in that organization, and help shape the experience for the end customers. In the process also learn a lot about the business that these companies are operating in, what kind of problems are they trying to solve, figure out MVPs for products and also get into the details of actually building it. Like really, really working deeply with engineering teams because these kinds of setups tend to be small. And so designers end up wearing like multiple kinds of hats in these setups as well. 

That’s largely how I see the Indian landscape today. I think historically probably the first companies to hire design talent in India would have been the tech and design services orgs, because they’ve existed for about three decades in India. While the first set of consumer internet companies building products out of India… When we started in about 2008, 2009. And some of those entrepreneurs laid the foundation for building and designing products out of India. The designers that we have today in India also come from varied backgrounds and that’s probably very similar to how things operate in the US as well.

We have designers who have a formal education in design, some that are kind of like self taught, and some that kind of migrate from other domains of design into UX. So it could be architecture, industrial design, graphic design, etc.

There is a vibrant design community now in India, and, and these platforms and these events are a great opportunity for designers to kind of connect, share experiences, share the work that they’re doing.

Peter: What you just mentioned is, one of the values of events, right? The shared experiences, people talking with peers and sharing kind of the challenges they’re facing. And I’m wondering what you see, let’s focus it on a design leadership level, right? 

You’re a design executive, a VP of design, leading a decent sized team. I’m guessing that, you know, other people in similar roles whether in Bangalore or other parts of India, what do you all talk about when you gather, or you get on a call, or you’re messaging each other, like what are those topics among the Indian design leadership community, at least that you’re part of?

Gaurav: I think there are some things that always kind of remain the center of discussions. Some of these are around hiring and challenges around hiring. While it’s fairly easy to hire at junior levels, I think it becomes extremely challenging when it comes to senior roles and especially leadership roles in India.

I think the talent pool that exists at senior roles in India is fairly small. And with all kinds of companies operating out of India, this is a talent pool that gets a lot of attention as well. So hiring and discussing hiring challenges always is a topic of interest for people. 

The other one I would say is, it’s just about kind of sharing challenges of influencing stakeholders in different kinds of forms and the kind of challenges that people have around, sometimes, frustrations around what would enable them to do better work at their organizations and what could be the learnings out of different scenarios, different organizations.

So that’s another, topic. I recently been involved in a lot of discussions at Flipkart and also elsewhere, where I’ve seen when designers at a certain level of seniority start thinking about how they should grow further. And a typical path that they pursue tends to be the people management role and growing as a people manager. Senior IC roles are kind of missing in India at this moment. And these opportunities also kind of missing. Flipkart, we’ve laid down career paths for senior ICs and build that track as well. But I think many young start ups are not yet aware of them.

There are GCCs that have fairly well documented paths for senior ICs. They also have a lot of senior ICs in the org. So that’s another topic of interest that has recently cropped up in conversation.

Jesse: I meet a lot of design leaders who say, I’d love to elevate ICs. I just don’t know what I would do with a bunch of principal ICs now. I don’t have a place for them in my processes or in my organization. And then I end up meeting a lot senior level ICs who haven’t been set up for success because the role hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their influence hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their measures of success haven’t been defined clearly enough. And I’m curious your thoughts on how you set up a senior IC for success.

Gaurav: This was a very passionate debate that happened within the organization while we were defining this path and laying down the competencies for the senior IC track. We leveraged a lot of work and a lot of documentation that exists for senior IC engineers, actually, and architects, as part of laying down the competency for engineers.

Engineering being a slightly more mature or… across the world actually has spent a lot of time defining these roles and defining how they differ from the people management roles. So we leveraged a lot of that work. 

I see it as a technical mentorship role as opposed to people management role. And that’s the key difference in my head, at least where these people will then lead a lot of technical mentorship and large scale design operations roles as well. 

So they would, for example, anchor the design systems. They would make sure that we build coherence across very different parts of the products that we’re building, which otherwise the two designers working on them may not even think about. So helping connect the dots across different parts of design and research is how we frame the role.

Peter: Something you mentioned at the outset when you were talking about your vision for the design team was growing the people on the team. And I think that connects with what we’re discussing now. And, I’m just wondering, what are the approaches you are taking to grow people?

Is it formal, you know, classes and training? Is it quasi-formal, kind of, like mentorship, that senior ICs could do? But yeah, just how are you operationalizing growing people in your team? 

Gaurav: It’s a mix of both. So we do have some formal trainings that are led by the Learnings and Development team at Flipkart. And then we do some informal trainings from within the team. Actually last year, we spent a lot of time figuring out people from within the team who could then train a lot of other people across the team. So, for example we could have a person who’s really good with motion design. And now we want to take this skill set across a large set of designers so that we just raise our bar on motion design overall in the product. And so we’ve identified such people and enabled them to train others and kind of mentor them in this process.

Peter: You mentioned earlier the hiring challenge. And I’m wondering if that’s related to your incentive to focus on growth. Are you putting these growth plans in place? Because it’s easy to hire people with less experience, but now you need to train them up. Is this a strategy for kind of addressing this gap in the market of senior design talent that is really hard to hire. And so you’re growing them from within, or is there a different motivation?

Gaurav: No, I think we look at both areas. We look at growing people from within, as well as we constantly look at the market as well, whenever there are opportunities to hire from outside. So it’s not one versus the other, I would say, but a combination of both. We do have a large base of designers at junior levels, and a lot of training and mentorship while the senior leaders kind of run on their own, they do need training at different levels. 

For example, new people managers need training around managing people, having difficult conversations, giving feedback. Some of the more administrative work that people managers end up doing. You know, performance conversation, stuff like that. So there are different kinds of trainings based on the role and the skill sets of designers that we look at.

Peter: One thing I hear all the time, from design leaders I’m working with or design orgs I’m supporting, is they have trouble making space for junior designers, right?

They can’t hire junior designers because of the environment that they’d be bringing them in. They wouldn’t be able to support junior designers as needed, right? ‘Cause designers are expected to be embedded in teams, possibly on their own, they might not have a management structure that can bring them up.

And so, at least in North America, a lot of companies just have kind of forsaken the junior designer and start, sometimes they start at senior designer, right? You know, five to eight years experience, because they know they can just throw them at problems and not worry about them. 

It sounds like you’re taking a different approach, right? You mentioned a decent, you know population of junior designers within your organization. How intentional was that? Like some companies, that’s an intentional strategy to hire juniors and grow them up. So is that part of it? 

And, what have you put in place to make sure that you’re setting up these junior designers to succeed, that they’re not flailing and sinking, right, in the sink or swim metaphor, being given too much responsibility too soon, and then they’re struggling. 

Gaurav: Yeah, I think it’s also one of the differences between US and India. I think it’s also got to do with the kind of market dynamics and the supply of designers that exist in the market. 

So there is definitely a shortage of senior designers in India at this moment, while there is an abundance of junior designers, I would say. There are a lot of design schools now in India with… that has courses in interaction design and UX design. So, I think we are producing designers in great quantities at the moment. So it’s just easier to hire at junior levels.

In terms of you know, not letting them sink, we do pair them up with senior designers. So as they learn about the organization, learn about the business. they are able to work with senior designers, with the managers, and kind of learn the ropes, and mature in the organization. But I would say it’s just a factor of the Indian market at this moment.

Peter: In the North American market, the complaint that you hear from junior designers is like, there’s a lot of us, but no one is willing to hire us, right? So there’s something different about how many North American companies are approaching hiring because I think the conditions are not all that dissimilar where you’ve got a sizable population of potential talent. 

But whereas in North America, they’ve just kind of chosen to neglect them in hopes of hiring that senior designer, it sounds like, at least in the Indian market, there’s a recognition like we’ve got to make this work. So…

Gaurav: Yeah. And about the challenges in the US, where the junior designers complain about not having enough opportunities, I was also thinking about the organizations and how the organizations are kind of set up. 

So the designers in each of these organizations, who are they kind of collaborating with? What kind of seniority of product people are they collaborating with? For example, in my organization, if I have to collaborate with the senior product leader, then it would be really hard for a junior designer to kind of voice a design stand. And therefore, I think it’s also critical to look at the kind of setups, and the kind of stakeholders that are building this product. 

Maybe in some of these companies, there aren’t enough junior product managers as well, and therefore, the designers end up collaborating with fairly senior product leaders. So if that happens at Flipkart, for example, I’ll have a senior person, a senior designer or a lead designer or even a manager in those conversations. 

Jesse: In so many organizations, design faces a fundamental cultural gap with the people who are in control of the business. The business has its way it likes to do things. It has its way it likes to communicate. In a lot of cases, these are practices that are inherited from legacy businesses, pre-internet businesses that are now entering digital spaces.

And I didn’t hear you talk much about kind of legacy businesses and, where they fit into that landscape. But I’m really more interested in how design culture runs up against business culture in the context of your experience. And what you notice about the challenge of bridging that gap. 

Gaurav: I think designers are traditionally not great with business, and it’s also got to do with how designers are trained in design schools. For example, business schools have adopted design thinking as part of their curriculum. 

There’s very little business exposure that designers get when they get trained. And often this seems to be at odds, business thinking, and the way kind of designers approach a problem. But actually in large companies, I think both need to work together fairly closely. And it’s important for designers to build that business acumen as well, to understand this company in the space that it operates in.

What makes a business successful? How’s the company generating revenue? What are the levers for the company to make profit, etc. And I think that background helps designers actually design better and helps designers collaborate better with business folks. If designers only take the user perspective and don’t look at the business, I think that’s where kind of conflicts arise.

But if they are able to effectively wear both these hats, the hat with which they are able to think user first and also think about the business, I think that’s where really powerful products emerge. 

Jesse: Couldn’t agree more.

Peter: Towards the beginning, you mentioned how you like to keep your hand in for lack of a better word, the craft, the details, right? You mentioned the visual design, the interaction design, the research, understanding what’s going on in those details, but given, the conversation we’ve had since and just now, talking about business, business culture, relating to the business, right, you only have so much time in your days and so many days in a week, and you have to figure out where it is most valuable for you to spend your time. 

And I’m wondering, particularly you’ve been in this role now for three or four years, right? Almost four years, how spending your time has evolved over these past four years, and kind of what that trajectory has been like, have there been themes or stages of your leadership since starting at Flipkart and, where are you now in that evolution?

Gaurav: Yeah, there have definitely been very distinct stages. I joined Flipkart in the midst of the COVID lockdown. And when I joined, it was a very inward-looking journey that I initially took. Inward-looking as in inward-looking towards the design team Fixing issues and gaps within the design team.

I also felt that there were certain parts of the product that needed attention. So for example, the core navigation of the product and how we laid out the core navigation for our users, it was kind of in different parts of the screen. And I thought that we were not enabling users to build habit on our product, and not letting them use Flipkart with ease. So these were some of the areas that I focused on heavily. 

Also some parts of visual design. So we ended up changing the typeface that we used on Flipkart. We ended up uplifting our visual design language through the design system that we were building.

And these were immediate changes that everyone in the org and hopefully our customers could also look at, and reflect that. Just looking at the team, I think they were just areas of, for example, building our competencies, figuring out a track for senior ICs, defining that career ladder, defining how we wanted to use competencies, not just for reviewing and for performance, but also for hiring.

So these were some of the initiatives that I took early on. And I think once some of these elementary things, I would say, kind of settled, that’s when I started engaging more deeply with, especially, with the business stakeholders. I don’t think in a product org, you can live without engaging with the tech stakeholders, but definitely with business stakeholders, the engagement kind of increased also, the ending of COVID lockdown had a big role as well because then it was easier to meet people face to face, bump into them and have these conversations.

Peter: And so what stage are you at now in your leadership journey at Flipkart? You mentioned starting with, like, managing down, getting the best out of the team. Once that’s settled, you kind of look up and out a bit more and partner with those business stakeholders. Are you still in that phase, or is there almost like a lean forward now, almost four years in, like, are you at a different point in your journey here?

Gaurav: Yeah, no, I think there’s definitely a lean forward. We are looking at creating more strategic impact. We are also looking significantly redesigning certain parts of the experience. We’re in a space that’s constantly evolving. So we are also creating new products for our customers.

We’re getting into quick commerce and how do we look at these kinds of experiences. Satisfying customer needs in a very short time. So there are different kinds of areas now that we are looking into and playing an active role in building these in a, in a fairly delightful manner, I would say.

Jesse: Gaurav, what are you looking forward to in this next phase for design?

Gaurav: I think I would like to see the Indian startup ecosystem kind of mature and grow and also design create a larger impact in this journey. Flipkart is a large player in this space, but I think there are also a lot of other companies doing some really good work in India.

And I think there is a huge opportunity for designers to design for Indian needs. India is a very, very diverse country. We have a population of about 1.45 billion, but it’s actually made up of many different Indias. We have 22 recognized languages in India, and we have diversity in terms of the affluence, in terms of technical savviness.

We still have people in India who are just experiencing the Internet for the first time on their mobile devices, and so their trust levels with the platform are quite different from someone who’s been using lot of digital products for a fairly long time. 

For example, there is a small population in India, which is primarily in the urban centers of India, okay, that behaves very similar to Californians, in terms of how they use digital products and the ease with which they use digital products and the frequency at which they use digital products. And at the same time, there is a population in Tier Two, Tier Three, and rural parts of India that is very different in terms of their taste preferences, rootedness in the Indian culture, and trust on the platforms. So it’s a very diverse space. There are lots of problems for designers to really solve for. And I would love to see more digital products built out of India and addressing these needs.

Jesse: Love it. Thank you so much.

Gaurav: Thank you. Jesse. Peter, for having me on the podcast.

Jesse: Where can people find you if they want to know more about you?

Gaurav: LinkedIn would be the best place. I do have a website that I don’t update very frequently, but that would be the other word other way to reach out to.

Jesse: All right. Thank you so much.

Peter: Thank you,

Gaurav: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter.

Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership,

Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. Joining us to talk about what’s next for digital product design is Leslie Witt, chief product and design officer for mental health care platform Headspace. Along the way, she’ll share with us her journey from designer to design leader to P&L business leader, she’ll also talk about building the credibility for a broader mandate for design as well as for yourself as a leader, and what to do when your intellectual tendencies get the better of you.

Peter: Hi, Leslie. Thank you so much for joining us.

Leslie: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Peter: So we always start these conversations in pretty much the same way, which is who are you, what do you do?

Leslie: I mean, that’s like an existential question, yes? Maybe I’ll start with the concrete answer. My name is Leslie Witt. I am the chief product and design officer at Headspace, which is the world’s largest, most accessible, and, I would say, increasingly most comprehensive mental health care platform out there.

And I also am a mom to twin 13-year-olds.

Peter: Excellent. Jesse and I are on a exploration. There’s been a lot of conversation in the community around some of the challenges of design leadership.

We’ve engaged this topic on the podcast a few episodes ago, on this thing we call the phase shift, and what we’re interested in is trying to figure out, or maybe do some sense-making around what’s next, right? Where are things headed?

And so we noticed that your job had changed from a VP of design to a VP of design and product, and we thought, oh, well maybe that’s, at least, a way forward. So, love to hear that story of what that shift has been like, from a design leader to a design and product leader.

Leslie: Look, titles matter–and they don’t. And so I say that just… I’m going to, I’m going to go a little side path first, and then I promise to get back to your core question.

I started my life with a very clear title and role. I trained as an architect. I got three degrees in it. My entire self identity was as an architect, and I discovered 10 years in that I really disliked being an architect. Oh.

And I decided to take a plunge into the world of what I would say, the unnamed. Now, many would call what I plunged into… I became a designer. I joined the company IDEO and one of the things that I most loved in that and kind of connecting to your, you know, I am now a this, was that we got to pick our own titles.

And, you know, in their ecosystem, I was at the time an environments designer, that was the non-formal way of saying architect. But I didn’t put environments designer on my business card. Instead, I picked a title that I would say through all my career permutations is probably what I most see myself as.

And I picked “utopian pragmsatist.” And I think many designers are utopian pragmatists, which is that we’re in this game because we believe we can change the world for the better, and that the better is possible, and that we’re then ruthlessly pragmatic about navigating the vicissitudes of now, the technical capabilities and possibilities, the compliance constraints, the commercial constraints to actually make something come to life.

And that’s the kind of designer I’ve always been. That kind of designer has woven into many categories and incarnations and titles.

And as I transitioned out of a consulting world that is very flexible about what you call yourself and how you show up and who you are and what you can be and in many ways has a model that benefits from that flexibility, into a corporate world that really likes to see people aligned against a skills matrix, loves to see things kind of crossed off and ticked off and told who, you know, owns decision making criteria, what I found was that my style of design was sometimes in direct conflict with the way in which the organization operated.

And so I spent six, seven years as VP of design at Intuit. Thankfully at a company who saw design as a strategic function on par with product on par with engineering. It wasn’t a subdiscipline. And one where design was chartered with core service innovation, something that many other companies is kind of the provenance of product.

What I came to feel was that I had a designer’s approach to problem solving, but in a world that largely ascribed that level of authority and decision making and kind of rights to drive change to a title called product.

And so, as I shifted over into another discipline, another organization, a different sector and industry I kind of, you know, had a brief, like, mourning and grief moment of kind of stopping my fight against the fact that these were the rites and rituals and promises of the design discipline, but instead to take a designer’s hat and approach and ethics into the world defined as product.

So, well, a little bit of a long narrative, but I would say, like, for me, this was coming to grips with the fact that the way I approach design, is largely mapped to the role of product in many tech organizations.

Peter: Follow on that, when we had our podcast that we called The Phase Shift, we actually talked about ego death. That designers need to be willing to let go of that identity as a designer and possibly embrace, and be willing to embrace new identities where they can still be whoever they are, but they might be known in a different way. And it sounds like that’s what what what has happened for you.

I’m wondering though…

Leslie: Can, can I, can I like slight, slight parsing on language? ‘Cause I actually think, like, the identity of the designer is important. I, I definitely feel like it’s, it’s my, it’s my soul and it’s a huge part of my arsenal and worldview, but the title doesn’t necessarily map.

And I think that there’s a difference between say an ethos and an approach, and a titled role. And that the designerly approach, you know, the power of divergent thinking, the ability to take behavioral insight and transform it into new propositions to actually have an aesthetic value that takes things beyond the utilitarian, like, a lot of these kinds of core ethos are things that don’t always map to the title designer.

You can still hold those to be true as you navigate a range of different disciplines.

Peter: Totally. I’m just wondering if, if what you are doing is any different with the title product and design than it was with the title design, or are you kind of showing up the same way and it’s just a different label?

Leslie: I, I would say a bit of both, to be fair. I think that as wearing the design hat and title, you are commissioned to be agent provocateur, right? And I would say, especially for me, like, coming from an innovation background, like you are expected to present with some level of future visioning, novelty, operating outside of constraints.

Yes, understanding commercial value, but not necessarily being foundationally constrained by it. You add a lot of value in that frame by kind of helping the group expand what could be very kind of here-and-now analytical thinking into a divergent possibilities-oriented space.

Now, I have to navigate more schizophrenia that impulse to do so, but with the power to actually be the person making the decisions on what we do or don’t prioritize, and it’s hard to do both well, and to own when you’re kind of stepping in which role, and that’s something that I’ve had to get much better at is when I’m not the person that’s commissioned to act in a particular way.

And so instead say, I’m going to have my head of design actually lead a visioning exercise, and then I’m going to be the person helping to deconstruct that and look at capability buildings, and data that we want to collect in order to prove out path X, Y, or Z. That the power position, you know, if I’m if I’m being honest of the product leader, it wields more authority, but then with that comes a level of constraint that doesn’t naturally sit with the role of design.

Jesse: I think that for a lot of design leaders, it’s just very difficult for them to square the role that they see over on the product side with their identity as designers. Now this seems like it’s been an easier bridge for you to cross in part because of what your design practice has always been. But I find myself wondering what you did have to reconcile yourself to as you were making this transition.

What was maybe hard to accept having to leave behind as you are squaring your identity as a designer with this new role, and what was maybe hard to accept that you had to take on.

Leslie: Yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a great push. A few things, you know, I would say like, I would have been out there in the early 1900s as like a suffragette. Like, I, I am the person that wears the banner that is the champion. And I’ve always been, and I do continue to be, a champion for design. And I mean, design here with like a capital D.

Like the art of, the practice of, the craft, and I would say what I’ve had to reconcile, even in a company that has a high premium on quality, is that there are dimensions and places where it matters a lot less. And so where do I fight that campaign and where do I say, actually, this is a workaday problem. This is something that is motivated by a very different set of need states, both organizationally and even from a member. And it’s not where there’s outsized value from levying design craft towards a challenge.

So I would say like that, that stepping aside and viewing things more clinically has been a change that I’ve had to make versus being the person who’s chartered to act as the champion.

And another that I would say has been a dimension to reconcile, is the level to which I have to lead with analytical thinking. I’ve always been, you know, I was a mathlete. I love numbers. I love data. But I historically was able to use it to reinforce a point, versus to kind of operate within a data landscape, first and foremost. And to use that to construct possibility versus to kind of throw out ideas that are either subjective or qualitative and to use experimentation only as a means to kind of prove or disprove.

And so a very different relationship to data, metrics, and numbers, and then a deeper level of responsibility. I mean, one thing I didn’t mention, I also am the head of our consumer channel. And so that level of responsibility for delivering the business and needing to make those decisions on prioritization with you know, an accountability to deliver a number as top of mind.

Peter: Does that mean you’re a operating as a general manager? Like you have P&L?

Leslie: Essentially. Yeah. I own the P&L for our consumer business.

Jesse: Accountability is an interesting thing when we think about the evolution of design. Because I think that on the one hand, design leaders would love to have more accountability. They just want to have accountability for things that actually matter. And there’s a lot of a sense that the business doesn’t know how to create accountability for design because the business doesn’t know how to evaluate design’s contribution to the business.

And I wonder from your perspective, kind of, both wearing your general manager hat and your designer hat and your product hat. That’s a lot of hats, but like…

Leslie: …it’s a lot of hats.

Jesse: …yeah, what, what can you see from all those different perspectives?

Leslie: Yeah. I mean, I think that when I only wore the designer hat or mainly wore the designer hat, as a designer, largely, the qualities that you are caring most about aren’t necessarily always the ones that you are most accountable to deliver. And they’re not far apart, but would say most designers I know, and I put myself in this category, care first and foremost about member value or customer value.

Is this thing that I have brought to life actually doing something meaningful and important? Did it fulfill its mission? And the range of proxy metrics that we sometimes use for those things, say, like, adoption or engagement, don’t necessarily prove out that you’ve actually added value.

There are also things that most people realize can be gamed to deliver a result that looks good on a dashboard, but isn’t necessarily getting to the core point. So like, I’ll give an example from the world that I live within, which is our core member value is that we help you feel better, that you’re less stressed, that you’re less anxious, that you have lower symptoms of depression, that you sleep better, right?

Those are actually like the values that we deliver. Now, I will always say, like, engagement is like the a priori to be able to deliver value. So I am pro-engagement, but it’s not the goal. And simply by delivering engagement, I don’t prove out that I actually delivered on value. By delivering on value, I don’t necessarily deliver value to the business.

And so what I have focused on, and where I see these worlds coming together and how designers can kind of bridge the synapse is one, to understand how the business makes money, to understand what value an end user derives from a service and to try their damnedest to bridge between those worlds and realities.

And sometimes that means actually getting into business model design. So, in a world where you want heavily for the reward to the organization to be that you built something of value, how do you actually think about the ways in which that either saves money or earns money, or, you know, kind of does, does something that actually sustainably means the organization is incented to actually align to that.

And I think that those dimensions… proving out that you understand the mechanics, that you are focused on durable value and that you can connect the bridge between those things, I think that’s where designers both gain a lot of credibility, and maybe that credibility supplants what often I think accountability translates to, which is I got autonomous decision-making authority.

I think very often that’s what, what folks would like accountability to mean. I think it’s that I am going to be someone who shows up and says, I’m going to move this number. I’m going to do this thing and no matter what, that’s the end outcome. And I’m going to move mountains in order to do so.

Jesse: It’s interesting because it also suggests sort of taking accountability for outcomes more than activities.

Leslie: I believe so. And now I’m talking at different levels of the food chain, right?

Jesse: How’s it different?

Leslie: I think that if you’re someone who’s on a working team that’s assigned a set of tasks, and asks if you’re, you know, a junior I C, independent of function, like, that set of arguments and kind of conceptual resolution has to have happened above your pay grade largely so that you are actually empowered to do that thing.

But that thing, doing that action and doing it well, and understanding how it ties up is something that you can be accountable for no matter what level of hierarchy you are at.

Peter: In conversations that I have with clients and just people out in the industry, and I’m wondering your take on, is as design attempts to identify how it can be held accountable, how it can be seen as valuable, those measures are, at least in anything that is used by people, the same as a product managers’ metrics, right? Design and product end up driving towards the same thing, which maybe speaks to why you’re in the role you’re in, but then, how have you, have you had to, how do you encourage others to navigate this tension where, at least in some organizations, functions need to prove themselves in order to like, you know, get headcount or whatever.

But if design doesn’t have a value distinct from product, how have you navigated that? Or how do you counsel others to navigate that?

Leslie: Yeah look, I think right now it’s shifting. So I could tell you how I navigated it in the past and we still, by and large, have, you know, a triad or a quad model where we’re looking at having, you know, a product leader who is, you know, establishing the product requirements and really kind of prioritizing attributes of the of the process in tandem with an engineering leader, who’s, you know, building out the kind of capabilities and scoping, and a designer who is, you know, anchoring exactly how that comes to life concretely within the user experience. Like we largely fall along a kind of traditional triad model.

But I’d say that, you know, with the rise of AI, right, and the reason I bring that up is that some of the technical dimensions of what have held those two disciplines apart are falling away as barriers. You know, I have a very, like, experimentation and data oriented designer on one of our membership teams who loves to build dashboards and technical experiments. Well, that’s something that used to be the kind of technical skill set of the product manager. I’ve got a pretty young and very ambitious product manager who has learned a lot about how to set things up in Figma, and is able to kind of take modern tools and, increasingly, content generation and like put together some pretty compelling flows and prototypes.

And so the blur that used to kind of exist between craft skill sets and things that I’d say had like a technical barrier to entry–and this is very much true for engineering as well, right? You know, it was like code, code was like the Holy Grail that no one could cross. And, and, you know, like that, that key to the castle that was locked up by computer science capabilities is, is it’s getting unlocked at least partially.

And so, what do you do with folks who, yes, have different potential biases, but come in with a lot of shared skill sets or lower barriers to entry on those skill sets? And I’d say we’re still very much navigating that reality. More apparent in certain sectors than other.

Peter: What do you mean by certain sectors?

Leslie: I mean, like depending on the problem that a team is chasing, there are ways in which the unique skillset of a craft based designer, it’s like we just defined and designed a new AI bot, but we’re joining the crew. The skillsets of conversation design, and even like brand design, we created a character.

It has a complete tonality and a name. Like, that’s a more craft-oriented challenge and one that it’s incredibly important to have someone with expertise nail, then say an adaptation of a set of flows and a simplification of clinical intake. It has a form. It has examples out in the world. I don’t necessarily need someone with deep finesse and deep craft expertise to tackle that. I need someone who knows how to build and test and use tools.

Jesse: As I imagine this playing out, into the future, it seems to me that if you’ve got, like, craft level design work that’s now happening in lots of different parts of the organization across a range of roles, some of which are not design roles and not participating in design processes per se, then it seems to me that the role of design leader, someone who’s going to be that champion for design as a practice, design as, as a value driver in the organization, it almost becomes more like governance.

Leslie: Maybe it’s governance and inspiration. I mean, I think like anyone, who’s played in the space of more traditional, like, graphic design. Often this still is the reality of say, like brand creative. That world has existed for a long while in defining guidelines. And then acting as enforcer, you know, brand police, they’re here like, you did it wrong. And, you know, while the team is deputized to do X, Y, and Z, if they have the skills, like the rest of everybody needs to align to a particular zone. And not to say that that doesn’t have some real value.

But I think it’s, I think that’s a depressing role. If what you’re out doing is kind of guard… it’s a retrograde role, right? Like, you’re almost by default, then, protecting the status quo versus pushing and defining the future.

And so I would argue that you might have less dominion, right? Like, there may not be 300 designers on your team who are involved part and parcel in everyone’s work streams or in a subset of work streams, but in some ways you have potentially more influence. And so, how are you out there now that everybody is cracking open ChatGPT to apply their hand at conversational design now that everyone is playing around with a variety of different tools and seeing what they can bring to life.

How are you, one, inspiring them with what quality looks and feels like, and how you think about a design process? How are you out there showcasing what good looks like? And then I’d say where I’m more interested in design-led governance is on questions of ethics, and, what is that insight into human behavior? What is that foresight, into the way that technology can evolve possibility, doing in terms of driving us to a better future? I think design kind of owes itself the responsibility of having an ethical viewpoint on it and helping an organization think in that capacity.

Peter: Why does it feel like design is often the one that raises its hand to care about ethics and the rest of the organization let’s it slide? Like this comes up a lot that that designers feel like they’re the ones who…

Jesse: why do we have to be the ones all the…

Peter: …yeah, who like, how is not everyone concerned with the ethical implications of what we’re doing, but designers, at least in my experience, are the loudest in the room, reminding people… deceptive patterns, right, was, was a concept that emerged from the design community, right?

It didn’t come from somewhere else. So yeah…

Leslie: To be fair, I don’t think designers are the only ones who care, but on the flip side of what we were talking about earlier, which is that designers are often not held accountable to a metric, I think there’s amazing freedom that comes with that too, because it’s freedom to operate outside of behaviors that are dictated by achieving a number.

Like, let’s say I’m a marketer who is going to be gold and bonused on whether or not I was actually able to increase sign up by 5%. I’m going to do my damndest to increase sign up by 5%. I’m going to do my damndest to increase sign up by 5%, right? And out of probably very seldom actually bad intention, I’m going to chase doing that in such a way that might have a lot of unintended consequences.

And designers have the right and the responsibility to point out what are the things that we’re systemically avoiding or how are we taking negative advantage of human behavior and motivation and, in a way, because designers also know those tactics, they are the ones most able to come back and say, hey, we’re actually like weaponizing,right, human psychology, we are doing something that sits opposed to our values basis. Now that’s like one thing to do when what you’re talking about is you know, a tactical marketing campaign.

It’s quite another, and I think it takes a level of intention and it absolutely takes buy in by other disciplines, and it takes both good intentions as well as mechanics to audit what actually happened when you’re talking about applications of LLMs, when you’re talking about what data privacy rights and consent are we putting in place of our members? Are we as explicit about both the intended use and the actual use of this as we need to be?

And, like, kind of holding up that lens of inspection for the organization. I think design often is one of the few disciplines that has both the skill sets to do so, and in many ways operates enough adjacent to the litany of metrics to be able to have the oxygen to do so.

Jesse: It seems to me the gap, then, here is really one of credibility, that the designers have the capability, they have the mindset and the appropriate, you know, resources to take on these challenges but they’re not being asked to, and when they do bring these things up they’re kind of like shunted aside.

Like, don’t bother me, kid, I’ve got a business to run here. And so a lot of these Design leaders feel like, if I talk about anything other than corner radii and button placement people think I’m talking out of turn. And so I wonder about, how to make the case that design has something to contribute here, even in cases where that alignment is possible, you know?

Leslie: Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest. I have not personally had that experience. So well, I respect that many have. I do think there’s a dimension of, what are the values of the place that you work and, that no one’s perfect, right? Like, but are you working in a place that has some level of precondition to care, right?

I mean, because there are places that surely don’t, and then I think you’re trying to run something up the flagpole that never going to stick. But I think most places, like, there’s an intention. There’s a set of positive intentions, at least at a like mission declaration level, but then bridging the gap between the operational metrics of how that business runs, and it’s ambitions, there’s a wide vacuum of definition between what those things are.

And you know, I think it’s incumbent, especially on a design leader to foundationally understand the commercial mechanics of the business that they work within, so that they can bridge that gap.

I mean, the same thing is true here. Why should the business care? To be able to speak in the language, not just of like, Hey, all we should care and we should do the right thing. Why? Like, what happens if we don’t?

Because what is often being seen if we don’t is, I either just cut costs, well, that sounds great, or I just put a little bit more money in the coffer. Well, that sounds great.

So you’re going to tell me a different narrative about why I shouldn’t. I think you need to do two things in tandem, like paint a concrete picture of the risk, okay, of continuing, and then create a concrete pathway of what else, like, if I don’t do this, what should I do? And so I think you can get into a position where you’re the person that’s flagging, why not, but you’re also not painting the path of possibility.

Peter: From what I can tell you have worked in pretty high design maturity environments, right? IDEO, Intuit. Now Headspace. And I think some of the challenges that we’re seeing are with design leaders who are operating in lower design maturity environments, where they have designers, but they, kind of, don’t know why. They just got them because that’s what you were supposed to do.

I’m wondering though, What can help people in these lower maturity environments, get some purchase, get some traction?

Leslie: A lot of the companies who hired IDEO back in the day, and I was there 2005 to almost 2014, were coming because they were not high design maturity environments. They were organizations that lacked these infrastructures and capabilities, and they often did have design organizations within them, but they were extremely tactical design.

You know, it was maybe one step different, one step more technical than a brand creative team. And that’s not to slam any of those things, but like, it was not design as a strategic function. Design didn’t own research. Design was very much, you know, there to execute.

Leslie: And what I would say essential to do, is to understand who cares about the idea of design, slash the things that you can do through design, having more power, actually having purchase and finding that champion as high up in the organization as possible is essential. And so, you know, one of the things I learned from that time period in life was we needed two things in order to be successful as consultants within those environments.

We needed like C-suite level championing, and we needed operational level advocacy buy-in and collaboration to what we were doing. Because if we had one without the other, the ideas were dead on arrival, right? Like, great, the CEO loved what we came up with, but this business leader has zero interest in executing on it. It wasn’t their idea. Thanks for the gift, but no, thanks, right.

And then the opposite side, if it was just like a passionate business leader who, you know, had zeal in the organization, it tended to have no staying power. And so there’s still real value because I would say, like, well, you’d get like a demonstrable point on the board. You’d have somebody who is committed to seeing something through from like, Idea to execution, but it was very hard to then kind of harness that as a repeatable event.

But, but if you can get that orchestration of a triangle, and maybe you’re doing it by proxy, you’re showing how this has worked effectively to build a business and other organizations, and as an individual, as a design leader, you’re making those relationships happen. You’re finding a high level advocate. You’re finding someone with whom you’re partnered who might have more decision making authority than you and you’re demonstrating in a tactical, tangible way that working in this capacity, where design has more influence or has more of a strategic charter, actually helped to do something meaningful, then you can start to grow that into a broader way of working.

I will say for the very same reason, as I stepped from consulting into corporations, I knew and I’ve stayed very strong on this. I would never take a head of innovation role or say, like a chief design officer role at a company that did not have any type of organizational maturity around design. And for me, that was because I had seen too often the way in which, like, that was, it was novelty. It was somebody to be brought out to an investor relations group to parrot, like, really cool vision work that really had very little consequence on the way in which the organization operated. And I don’t think a singular hero can affect organizational change.

Peter: A question that I’m often asked is, how do you know that the companies you’re talking to are mature? Like, what are the indicators that they’re the kind of place where design could thrive? I’m wondering, as you shifted from Intuit to Headspace, what were those indicators that you saw at Headspace that allowed you to feel like, okay, this is a place where I can actualize myself in some way.

Leslie: Yeah, I mean, in that case, for pure honesty, I was recruited by someone I had worked with before, who I’d worked with at both IDEO and Intuit, at least adjacently. And so I had a trust in who would be my boss, the CEO, and that was huge because I knew that person had a visceral understanding of both me and the role that I saw design playing in the expanded field.

I would say that the other indicators, you know, I could look at the product and tell that there was a care for craft. There was a demonstrated history. And then probably the kicker for me was that the conversations I had multiple times across, even like the CFO, referenced the research that design had led to understand the core landscape opportunities.

And, that proof point of hearing someone else unbidden reference qualitative design research that was like, okay, this is real. And this is a place where that input is taken seriously as part of driving a business strategy forward.

Jesse: Yeah…

Leslie: And look, I don’t, I don’t pretend that everybody gets to cherry pick. Like, well, no, I’m not going to join that organization. And no organization is perfect. Far from it. For any role. And I would say, like, part of now wearing more and more hats, like the, person in charge of that P&L and the person in charge of our product prioritization, I see that there are frustrations and downsides and maturity issues across the continuum in a way that I probably didn’t respect as a designer who felt like I was lone man on an island and a place where everyone else had well-defined, well defined, well respected roles. this frustration I think is actually something that can be leveraged positively as a universal driver to enlist collaborators in your cause, because you can actually help them buoy their cause.

Peter: If my quick Googling is bearing out, you’ve had two new CEOs since you joined. So you’re on…

Leslie: …that’s correct. I’m on my third.

Peter: So given that you were brought in by one CEO and that relationship was so important, what has changed for you? This is something I noticed myself as a design leader, even if I wasn’t reporting to a CEO, even if the CEO barely knew who I was, who the CEO was had a very direct bearing on my ability to succeed as a design leader. And I’m wondering, kind of, how that has shifted and evolved as you’ve had new leadership come in, and how you’ve had to kind of show up, either the same or differently, given the nature of what was happening in the C-suite.

Leslie: Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, I will say that it’s hard to navigate a managerial change. And I think about that all the time you know, I think there’s not a designer out there, there’s not anyone who’s worked in a corporation who hasn’t gone through a reorg. And then, you know, if you’re, newly mapped to a new manager, even if that person existed in the organization before, they’re new to you and establishing that level of trust and belief and knownness and shared philosophy and prioritization is hard, right? Even if at the end of the day, you have mutual respect across the continuum.

And so, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. You know, I mentioned I was recruited by someone who knew me and actually had known me at least in these kind of like off and on ways for over a decade. And so I was able to hit the ground running and I had really been hired, although my title didn’t say product, I was hired to drive our explorations around stepping into the mental health care space for us, like, running a therapeutic pilot that then led to a set of M and A evaluations and that’s actually something that I discovered when I was into it because I was leading a lot of the innovation product space. I really love actually thinking about not just organic growth, but inorganic growth and helping to drive that evaluative process. It’s itself a very, like, creative act.

And that path led us to acquisition of a company Ginger. Which is how I got my 2nd boss, because as we made that decision to merge, the decision was made that that company’s CEO would become the boss. And deep respect for that individual who was with us for the last 3 years and just recently left the company, which will be the kind of 3rd chapter.

But what was different foundationally was that I would say we went from an organization whose business model meant that design as an act and product as a medium were the primaries to an organization that built an enterprise benefits platform where sales was the primary, and so a very channel centric view of the world versus necessarily service centric world and a really different means by which you make money.

You have to get a singular buyer to see enough value to sign up for a massive, sometimes multimillion dollar contract. And so they’re looking at like, how many boxes do you check? How confident are they that this thing is going to stand the test of time? And it deprioritizes some of the dimensions of what I had most cared about in the advocacy that was very directly mapped to our ecosystem.

And so in that world. You know, as I saw how I could both shape our commercial model as well as shape what I wanted to have happen, that’s how I became the head of our consumer business. Was like looking at where does the influence that I want to have actually sit within this ecosystem and, you know, to be quite honest, I would say with our, third leader who’s come in really to help us take the world that we’ve now fully integrated, and, you know, we kind of like we have gotten through that incredible platform transformation that if any of you have ever gone through, it’s not necessarily a fun one, but it like gets you to a place where it just has different potential energy forward.

Like he’s now here to act as like a maximizer. How do we take that and really take all the latent potential and maximize that energy. And I imagine that we’ll need to permute again, right? Like what are the things that the organization now cares about? How do we meaningfully shape them? And, in a world that now has a whole set of new technologies, in this world, what are the things that will matter most to an organization, both from an innovation and an incrementality standpoint?

Jesse: I’m curious about where things are going, as we’ve seen innovation, as a standalone function, kind of fall by the wayside, innovation consultancies are having a hard time selling those services these days. And yet you did identify it earlier in this conversation as being something that design really has an opportunity to contribute toward, with design’s own toolkit and mindset and skill set. But then I wonder about what you said about having to embrace the spreadsheets and step into the world of the analytical in order to actually take on that role. And I’m wondering, where would you see an ideal place for some more of that old innovation magic in here?

Leslie: Well, believe it or not, I actually think I’ve come to love the world of prioritization, and that where I see it able to really create space for the new, both the minor new and the mega new. You know, there’s a variety of different frameworks you can use, but the one I’ve loved for years is a horizon innovation framework, and it looks at the portfolio of SKUs and channels and kind of activities of an organization and ranks them on their maturity, and then assigns resources really based on that maturity.

And what you want to have is a lot of things that are in the horizon one category, which means they’re fully mature. Like that doesn’t mean they no longer get investment. It actually means they get your most investment because you, you know, far more as you get further down the pike, the value of level of effort equals level of result.

And so they’re highly predictable. You know, it’s where almost all of your go-to-market dollars should be spent, and it’s the cash engine that runs the company so that you can invest in a few things that are in horizon two and maybe one or two things that are in the horizon three hopper.

And, you know, if you go to horizon three, that’s where I’d say, like, that’s where innovation sits. And as a company, you want to be placing as small, but as a complete, of a bet around a set of things that you think could be your future and giving them enough oxygen that they can deliver meaningful results that will actually be indicative so that you can decide whether or not you should fuel them or kill them, right.

You know, it’s more of a. intrapreneurship type of experience and one that I’ve found a lot of pleasure in doing within the idiom of, if successful, it’s transformative, either to the way that we do business or to the way that we drive commercial value and to know that you may not necessarily, even if it’s greenlit, get permission to then build it internally.

That’s a great hopper horizon three, for M&A, right? Like, okay, great. We proved this out. This actually is something that there are more mature businesses out in the ecosystem that we might decide to bring in, or this is actually something that we want to grow and scale internally.

And that’s really what that middle hopper is about. So I would say, like, the space I found for innovation is to develop a kind of discipline and rigor about it that lets you allocate resources, as unsexy as that sounds, but to quarantine those resources so that they’re protected and can actually do their job.

Jesse: Right. So this suggests then that if design really wants to actively participate in these processes, it means sharpening your ability to do some strategic long term forecasting from a design stance, a user value stance.

Leslie: Yeah. I mean, yeah. One of the things I learned at IDEO, I mean, not like in a formal way, but by, like, peering over the shoulder of the few, we called them business designers, but basically the 10 human beings in the organization who had MBAs, was, they would do a lot of discovery driven planning, which is a fancy word for basically saying like, I don’t know what this is going to do, but I can set up a set of variables, like, and some of those are known: H ow big is this addressable market? What might we price this at? What would be a believable, you know, X, Y, and Z in terms of adoption. And I can make this machine that lets me explore possibility and see like, from an incrementality standpoint, does this matter if I get 10x more people to sign up?

That passion for, I can make this so much better, has to be linked to, and if I do, does it matter? And making a model to kind of prove out to myself, okay, yeah, yeah, this is something I should continue to think is a big deal. Or, ooh, okay, even if I 5x this, at the end of the day, we’re talking about a business that’s in the single digit millions. Well, that’s probably not worth the time and effort versus something that has just a much bigger, you know, delta.

Peter: As you were reflecting on some of your experience at IDEO, I found myself thinking or wondering about career development, right? You had an opportunity for career development. You were able to pivot from architect, into environments designer, into some type of general strategic business savvy design lead, who then was able to then kind of take that and go quote, unquote in house and, thrive at places like Intuit and, Headspace. And it’s not a secret that design agencies and consultancies have, whether or not they’re on the wane, the percentage of design practice happening in those environments versus in-house is way skewed.

And I’m curious your thoughts on what we as a community, as an industry, as a practice are missing by not having those types of environments that tended to create a space for a certain kind of practice that you don’t get typically inside of enterprises, inside of corporations. And then, not only what are we missing, what, if anything, have you tried to institute as a design and product leader now with authority, with people listening to you, you have power. What have you tried to do organizationally within the spaces that you oversee to encourage that kind of professional development?

Leslie: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I just want to acknowledge, I think that, you know, through no dimension of will, but through total serendipity, it was an incredible time to get to have that moment where design was a darling at the ball, where IDEO had that type of like broad stroke permission to come into spaces and to be consulting fortune 100 company CEOs about perspectives on their companies with total hubris.

And like I look back on that as something that gave me probably undo confidence, but a level of confidence that certainly is valuable as we carry forward. So I want to acknowledge that as a starting point. So that’s not necessarily the reality of right now.

I think, like, in exchange there has been, you know, at least up till very recently, and I believe it’s not going to like change and pivot on a dime, many more roles for folks with design backgrounds of a variety of ilks to step into high paying corporate roles. That wasn’t really the world that existed back then.

And I think in exchange, however, it becomes very easy to become, you know, in the kind of ideal parlance of the T-shaped individual, where the long arm of the T is your depth and the horizontal arms, IDEO worked really hard on building those horizontal arms. And that makes it really easy to grab somebody else’s hand and skip on over and, you know, pretend for a while that you have another depth and then actually develop it.

And I would say that those arms have to be very intentionally exercised in a corporate environment. You can get pigeonholed, especially in a large corporate environment, into extremely kind of technical sub-dimensions of a skill. And that might be how you get hired, right? Like, I actually got hired to IDEO because I was a good 3D modeler, and they needed somebody who could 3D model. Now, I did two projects where I 3D modeled, and then I tried my damnedest to never do it again.

But I do think a lot of times why you are hired isn’t necessarily why you stay, and it’s definitely not necessarily why you move up in the world. And so, you are the one who knows both, like, who you are as a myriad individual the best, the organization doesn’t know. It doesn’t fit neatly into a matrix. Grab the thing that you’re both most passionate to learn and that you actually think you have a chance of being successful at, and raise your hand, use it as a ladder to advocate for what you think you can do, what you want. And then try your damnedest to do it well, and that’ll create opportunity.

It’ll also help you understand, like, do I actually enjoy doing this? And so I think that that dimension, and that does assume that probably is some privilege wrapped around that, but like that dimension of intentional self advocacy, and not necessarily foresight on what’s going to be important, but insight to yourself is key. And being okay with the fact that I think like another design nature is like, you get bored. Seize that boredom as like the biggest thing that jets you forward. Don’t just like keep rinse repeating.

Like you’ve mastered that skill, you’ve achieved mastery, move on. Keep it as part of your like, it’s part of your toolkit. What else do you want to know? What else do you want to explore? What else do you want to learn? I would say in our organization, we probably aren’t as institutional about it as we could be and should be. But we have a fair number of forums that are very democratic in the way that they work. And everything from, you know, your kind of traditional hackathon, those can be formed with teams from kind of anyone’s input, anyone can kind of propose sets of ideas forward.

I make myself available weekly with an open office hours, and I would say what I see is across functions and across levels, the folks that most want to come and kind of pitch themselves in an idea, show up, they show up and they, they put themselves out there. And I do think you have to take some of those risks in order to yield the opportunities that you desire.

Peter: I realized I don’t know what all you oversee. I imagine design and designers, maybe researchers, but is there like data or other product functions that are in your world as well?

Leslie: Not necessarily producty functions. I also have our whole content organization. So, you know, Headspace makes, a wide variety of multimedia content. And so that organization lives within my purview in reporting structure, the brand creative team lives within my structure as does our science team.

And so that is group of folks who have mostly clinical backgrounds, as well as actuarial backgrounds, who are responsible for evaluating whether we are efficacious, right? Like, do our services work? They run RCTs, they collect real world evidence, they run longitudinal studies to understand health outcome savings. And we do have a few clinical psychologists who are product managers as well, because we are making, you know, healthcare a consequential product.

Peter: How did you make it clear to the C-suite that you were credible in leading clinical psychologists, right? You don’t have a background in that. You don’t have a degree in that you’re like, or…

Leslie: I don’t,

I don’t have a background in that.

Peter: But I get the sense you must have demonstrated some ability or capability that allowed others to go, Oh, okay. She can stretch beyond the boundaries that, that she’s currently in.

So let’s, give Leslie more responsibility. What do you ascribe that to?

Leslie: I tend to wear a pretty strong veneer of credibility period, like, to own that. Like, I am versant, I am fairly intellectual, I’m pretty rigorous and I used to be an academic, and while I wasn’t an academic in areas like clinical psychology, you know, like with ability to speak post-structuralism and kind of go heady, you can, you know, help yourself like be nimble and appeal to the folks who have PhDs.

And so that’s how I ended up inheriting the science function, was when our head of clinical at the time left the company. That team asked to report to my organization. And I think that’s because they had experienced directly that I cared about what they were doing. I valued it and I could get smart enough quick enough that I knew how to empower them.

And I do think that a large part of that, you know, organizational choices tend to not just be tops down. But they’re bottoms up and which functions decide they can thrive under your leadership is a major factor in terms of where things end up sitting.

Peter: I’m glad you used the word intellectual. Because it’s been evident, frankly, in our conversation that you are well read, extremely articulate, broad vocabulary. And if I am immodest, I like to think similar things about myself and that has gotten me in trouble in a lot of contexts,

Leslie: Me too. Me too.

Peter: I am very comfortable going very abstract, being very heady, being very conceptual, being intellectual. And I think, losing people overcomplicating situations. All of that. And I’m wondering, it sounds like you, you know, you’ve had a little bit of that experience, is this something you’ve had to kind of consciously dial in?

What, what have you done to manage maybe some of these tendencies and inclinations in making sure that you’re coming across as, confident, capable, but not like overwhelming in the way that can sometimes happen to folks who get really spun up about their ideas.

Leslie: Yeah I mean, I think I’m still on that journey. Let’s be completely honest. But I’ve had some great advice along the way. I had my first boss at IDEO was a gentleman named Fred Dust, who also came from an architectural background. And, a delightful human, and he would just call me out and mock me endlessly when I would use way too many multisyllabic terms. And I think one that I remember, I was talking to, like, I think American Eagle Outfitters, it was like a very workaday retailer that we were doing a project for. And I said something about perambulate and he’s like, she means walk. And so he would just, just make fun of me.

And I realized that there had been this normalization, especially in architecture of speaking in a particular way that wasn’t intended to obfuscate, but did. And so I try to like tap that down. I would actually say like in a funny way, the more excited and ad lib I get, the more it comes out because then I’m not like intentionally thinking. And in my natural state, I still retreat there. I do a lot of writing and I tend to write like it’s some long form prose,

Peter: For yourself or for public consumption?

Leslie: Um, for all sorts of reasons. Both, I do both. But I would say, like, first and foremost, I was mentioning it because I tend to write to think. in order to process, like, what really do I think about this and how is that going to manifest in, you know, X, Y, Z sets of decisions, and I need to do the corpus you know, some people are like, I just need the TLDR.

I’m like, well, to get to the TLDR, I have to write the big part first, and then, like, distill and reshape. But yeah, so I’m definitely still on that journey. I can be pithy at times. But, tend to like love a good long form debate.

Jesse: Leslie, what are you most curious about as we enter this next phase?

Leslie: I tend to be hopeful. And, I’m going to just kind of focus on, like, what the possibilities of technology bring. I like to imagine a world in which, like, these radically more empathetic means of interacting with technology help us address the loneliness crisis. They help us have people feel more seen and more heard and that doesn’t have them needing to navigate some obscure graphical user interface in order to find what they need, but like, just kind of surfacing the world to them is knowing what they need. And it’s kind of working in this capacity that’s helping fill the blank.

I think that when I think about being an employee, kind of independent of function, that we’re not being made obsolete, but we’re becoming super-powered and that that’s, you know, allowing us to step outside the mundane, do a hell of a lot less of that and reserve time for things that creative human beings can only do, and that we’re going to understand that those dimensions of what I just articulated as kind of best case scenario are highly privileged. I’m less worried about like, do, does so and so’s profession become obsolete, do radiologists get replaced by the machine?

Like, I’m less worried about that because largely all of those people will be fine. I am more worried about you know, an economic reality, a social reality, a political reality that is already harshly schismed and divided. And where both the resilience of folks who are at the bottom of the pyramid, as well as the means to take positive advantage of the evolution of technology is so much lower and how do we, as a society, as, as social engineers, how do we tackle that intentionally, so that we’re not increasing what I would say we are already, already clearly seeing, which is that it foments immense discord, violence in the world.

Jesse: Well, if design leaders and design teams can do something to shift all of that, that’s a vision worth reaching toward.

Peter: Most definitely.

Jesse: Leslie, thank you so much for being with us.

Leslie: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Peter: Yes. Thank you.

Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet?

Leslie: Sadly, I would say LinkedIn is the best place to find me

You can find me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I, for whatever reason, just never hopped on the Twitter brigade. And then once it became X, like had no interest. So, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn and look forward to connecting.

Jesse: Thank you again.

Leslie: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter.

Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.chrome-extension://knjbgabkeojmfdhindppcmhhfiembkeb/index.html

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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. 

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?

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.

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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,

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.

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. 

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?

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.

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?