Vivianne: It was kind of a culture shock, honestly, to the switch into UX, this field that raves about how human-centered they are, and how little they talked about doing the personal work required to actually be human-centered.

Peter: I’m Peter Merholz,

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Together: And we’re Finding Our Way

Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, in a conversation recorded two days after the 2020 US Presidential election, as the votes were still being counted and uncertainty hung heavy in the air, we’re joined by Vivianne Castillo, UX research leader and educator, to talk about, appropriately enough, trauma. Trauma in the workplace, trauma in our lives, and trauma in society.

We’ll talk about what UXers can learn from human services professionals, and we’ll talk about acknowledging the true power of designers to not just help people, but harm them as well.

Vivianne: I guess, a little bit of context, I come from a counseling and helping service professional background. So I made a career switch into UX probably about, I don’t know, four or five years ago now, time means nothing at the moment, but a few years ago, and initially when I broke into UX, I was really excited about how this industry talked about being human-centered and empathy and I remember winning a scholarship to go to the O’Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco and super excited to be listening to these leaders in the field talk about these topics. Talk about the role of diversity and inclusion in tech and design. And at the end of the conference, I was sitting in my hotel room, just kind of reflecting on what I had heard and I was like, “Wow, like this is bullshit,” when it came to how UX professionals were talking about empathy.

And I have a different take on it. And part of that is just from my training as a counselor and a therapist. But when I started to initially speak and write within the UX field, it was about diversity, equity, and inclusion, how the way we talk about it tends to be BS within the industry.

I talked a lot about the role of shame when it comes to research and design, and really, for me, there’s a time and place for personas, journey maps, et cetera, et cetera. Those things are important, but I’m more interested in that deeper human undercurrent when it comes to our work. And I think trauma especially is a topic that we need to be talking more about.

I think when we look at 2020 in and of itself, it’s just been a year of, not necessarily stress, it’s been a year of trauma. You have the trauma of COVID and the pandemic, which also just impacts folks in the majority versus minority employees very differently. Folks in the black and Latinx community were more likely to know folks who have passed away from COVID than their white colleagues. You have the trauma of June where Corporate America kind of realized, I guess, they’re racist. And so now you have this month of June where you’re having a lot of these companies, a lot of these well-meaning colleagues try and have these conversations. And, in many ways, often, deeper traumatizing their black colleagues and underrepresented minorities.

And then you have, political trauma of this election. And in America, specifically, politics is life or death for minorities. So, it’s been a very stressful time, a very traumatic time to say the least, and that impacts the workplace. And if there’s one thing that 2020 has taught us, and has maybe reinforced probably more so for the majority, it’s that you can’t dichotomize our personal life from our professional life anymore.

Jesse: This question in my brain is being asked by Peter: What do you mean when you use the term “trauma” here?

Vivianne: In its very simplest form, trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event. Sometimes you’ll hear people talk about big-T trauma, little-T trauma. So little-T trauma is things like, you’re moving away as a kid, or a sudden disruption in maybe like a major plan you had this year, like going to a wedding or having that really big birthday party. Whereas big-T trauma, think about, like, physical assault, think about the pandemic.

And there’s different types of trauma. You have acute trauma, again, these more, like, smaller moments of emotional responses to terrible events. You have chronic trauma. These are things that are dragged out over a period of time. And then you have something that’s called secondary or vicarious drama.

Vicarious trauma comes from being repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma and their stories of traumatic events. I mean, 2020 in a nutshell, right? the way that vicarious trauma specifically plays out is things like frustration, anxiety, irritability, uh, disturbed sleep, or like nightmares, problems managing personal boundaries, loss of connection with self or others, or a loss of sense of your own identity and your values.

It definitely runs a spectrum.

Peter:  I’m wondering if you feel that all UX practice and practitioners warrant this level of depth, regardless of the problem space people are working within, or is this something that is more around, well, yeah, if you’re working in healthcare, sure, you need to understand these things, but if you’re trying to just help people listen to music, okay, you get a pass on matters of trauma. Like, how do we calibrate it, so we don’t feel like we have to be all trauma all the time, but that we are engaging appropriately with some of these deeper, heavier concerns, even in areas that might not seem like it warrants it.

Vivianne: Even if you’re designing a to-do list app, I think that if you’re going to profess to be human-centered, you need a more holistic approach to that. And part of having a more holistic approach to being human-centered is understanding things like trauma. And I get that, naturally, no one wakes up in the morning, they’re like, “Man, I really want to dive into trauma. I just want to, like, read about it all day. I want to sit in that.” That’s not the expectation nor is that the way that even folks who have to deal with these topics, how they handle it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how UX professionals in particular tend to align themselves with the product and tech industry, when in reality, I think we need to align ourselves more with the human service industry.

And when I think about what a human service professional is, I think that human service professionals are individuals who uniquely approach the objective of meeting human needs through an interdisciplinary knowledge base, focusing on prevention as well as remediation of problems, and maintaining a commitment to improving the overall quality of life of people. And so, that’s social workers, that’s counselors, public administrators, but that sounds a lot like UX professionals.

And so, when it comes to trauma, for me, it’s not even necessarily all about, How can I make sure that we aren’t making product decisions that are causing trauma? I do think that’s important topic as well, but it’s also about understanding how does trauma impact you and your work and your ability to collaborate with people, your ability to be innovative, your ability to be vulnerable enough, to know when to ask for help with your teammates and your colleagues.

So, it’s a part of just understanding how to work within a work environment that’s collaborative and it’s bringing out the best of your work as well.

Peter: If you look at the history of UX and HCI, the way that we choose to understand humans emerged from trying to figure out how people use tools. It was essentially applying that to software interfaces. So, a lot of, like, cognitive psychology was the primary means of understanding people so that we could design software that they could understand and manipulate and use.

Something that I hadn’t thought of, until you just mentioned it, is how because of the degree to which software is shot through, infuses literally every aspect of our lives now, that simple information processing approach to user research, which, again, is the foundation upon which most UX research is understood, is no longer sufficient. This is now a social, societal concern. How do we evolve this practice of UX to recognize it’s not just about behavior with software interfaces, but something deeper and more fundamental that these software interfaces are now enabling everywhere?

Vivianne: I think a part of it is just recognizing that in the beginning of UX and the development of it, if you’re looking at the founding UX forefathers, a lot of them are white able-bodied men. And so a lot of these decisions that they’ve been making, when it comes to software and products, has always been affecting, and oftentimes excluding, folks who are in marginalized communities or folks who are minorities.

So I think it’s moreso recently the reason why we’re having more conversations about this is because now you have four generations in the workplace. And Millennials and Gen Z, we’re more diverse generations, where we also grew up being able to talk more freely about these topics in the workplace and in school settings.

And so, you’re looking at what I think is a clash of different generations and different points of view on the importance and the urgency of talking about these things. And so when it comes to, how do we start to signal to the rest of the UX community, that there are deeper elements and even just consequences to our design decisions and our ability to apply our awareness of depth of humanity to our work streams, I think a couple of things need to happen.

I think, one, we need to elevate more voices within UX leadership that aren’t from the majority. I mean, my greatest fear is that there will be certain leaders in UX who will attempt to rebrand themselves for the sake of being relevant and talking on things and issues that really, they have no level of expertise or business talking about when they could be pulling a seat to the table and bringing other voices to the conversation.

And then the other thing is, I think it’s just reminding the UX community that we are not special snowflakes. There are industries, there are professions who have done very deep work on actually being holistically human-centered.

I think about the American Counseling Association and they have a code of ethics and even in their code of ethics, they talk about the importance of self-care and it being an ethical imperative. And, the importance of understanding when you are physically, emotionally, spiritually even, burnt out and it’s affecting your ability to perform. And reason why they even call that out in their code of ethics is because they recognize the ability to cause harm to people if you aren’t operating at your best self.

We need to really lean into what human service professionals are talking about, and even what they’re training their professions in school. I think UX professionals, we pride ourselves on all things empathy and advocating for people, and I think that’s right. But I also think that what comes often with roles where extending empathy is a key part of your responsibilities is compassion fatigue. And compassion fatigue, this is not a new or sexy, like, phrase or word. Again, this is something that is commonly talked about among human service professionals.

Even teachers experience this, nurses experience this, but compassion fatigue is always going to be experienced by people where extending empathy is a core aspect of what they do. And really, compassion fatigue is the profound, like, emotional and physical erosion that takes place when folks are unable to refuel and regenerate.

So imagine if UX professionals actually understood that at some point in their career, they’re going to experience compassion fatigue. This isn’t, “Oh, I’m never going to experience it.” It’s a question of when and being able to recognize those symptoms: difficulty concentrating, increase likelihood of you isolating yourself, insomnia, overeating, excessive use of alcohol and drugs.

What would our approach to being human-centered be like to other people, if we could actually be more human-centered and conscientious of ourselves.

Jesse: As you were talking about the need for UX professionals to start looking to other models for their profession and for their practices, to what human service professionals are already doing and already understand around these things, I noticed that this very much goes against what seems to be the trend in UX these days, which is toward increasing quantification, and people building these elaborate systems of metrics to support design decisions, and the whole set of issues that you’re talking about are things that can’t be captured by those quantitative methods.

So it feels like there’s this two-fold kind of thing. At first, you’ve got to pull people’s attention away from the numbers toward the qualitative and holistic view of what’s going on. And then even beyond that, then you’ve got to educate them about trauma or the potential for trauma or the potential for harm that’s created there.

And all of that is just within a product design and development process, which is separate from the whole other side of the equation for leaders, which is how do they manage their organization and how do they structure their teams? How do they work with their teams and create cultures that are aware of these issues? To your point, you can’t really separate how trauma affects us as practitioners from the role that trauma plays in product design anymore. And I am wondering, How leaders can improve their awareness of how these issues play out within their team?

Vivianne: I do think you can quantify this. In my current role, I work with C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies, so I’m often having a lot of these types of conversations where I’m leveraging primary and secondary research, both qual and quant, in order to help them be more holistically human-centered in their approach to business development and strategy and how technology and product can power that. And so, I remember one time talking to an executive and they’re like, “Yeah, all of this stuff is good, but at the end of the day, this is about data, this is about numbers.”

He’s like, “I think the whole, human-centered thing is cute. but this is about data and numbers.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool.”

So, like, people create data and data comes from people. So you need to talk about people and understand that it’s about both to quantify it a little bit, even, to some of the comments you’re saying.

Well, think about when it comes to trauma, and, like, burnout, when it comes to compassion fatigue. Think about the way that this impacts the business on a dollar-sign level. So for example, I am fully anticipating a spike in FMLA leave between now and probably January as well as in the summer. I think this whole year, a lot of companies, teams, UX teams have been talking about stress and burnout and they have really missed the ball by not talking about trauma. think about what that means when it comes to, now you have to spend time hopefully finding a contractor to fill in an aspect of work, because one of your employees is taking an absence of leave.

Think about the increased amount of time people are spending off, and what does that mean when it comes to workflow and production? Think about folks who are, realizing, “Hey, like, actually my workplace is… this is not conducive to my mental or emotional wellbeing. This is toxic. And I’m leaving.”

Think about the amount of money, now, these companies are spending, having to recruit to interview, and to find someone else to replace that person. So for me, a trauma-informed workplace and team is also just a part of good business when it comes to having a sustainable workforce. I’m blanking on the other question that you asked, but…

Jesse: Yeah, so my other question was, given that those things are all these untracked or relatively invisible costs to these organizations, how do leaders bring the awareness up of those impacts? How do they improve their own awareness of those impacts in order to be able to take action on it?

Vivianne: I mean first and foremost, it starts with education. It’s hard to actually understand the impact that it’s having on your team if you aren’t aware of the complexity of this and how it’s playing out, within not only the workplace, but just in general, how trauma operates.

So, one thing that I’ve been doing is really just educating leaders on trauma and the difference, too, between trauma and burnout. Also assessing their confidence level and being able to talk about these topics and lead your team through difficult times, whether that is an election, whether that is protests and riots that are happening in June, and being able to really, in many ways, do a self-assessment to understand not only your ability to talk about things like trauma, but the undercurrent things that are also driving those conversations, like racial injustice and inequity.

Especially with this election, you can’t necessarily lead your teams, and hopefully they are diverse teams, you can’t necessarily lead them without being able to talk about race and racism and hatred. That’s very much a part of that conversation. So, when I’m teaching and equipping leaders how to have these conversations, I’m also teaching them about the difference between shame and guilt, because more times than not, when you’re talking about things like racism or politics and trauma, shame and guilt are often triggered.

Guilt is, “I made a mistake,” whereas shame is, “I am the mistake.” And more times than not, especially for folks in the majority, they tend to experience shame in these conversations, these messages of, “Oh, you’re saying I’m the mistake. You’re saying that I’m the problem.” And then that’s where the defensiveness comes in. That’s where that fight-flight-or-freeze comes in when it comes to these conversations.

So, I’m often equipping people as, “Hey, physiologically, here’s what’s happening to you if you’re starting to experience shame.” And I’m also giving them tools of how do you ground yourself in that moment, so you can still be present and listen to your colleagues, listen to your team members as they’re processing and working through what’s happening, not only outside of the four walls, but within the four walls of work.

Because the other thing, too, that I’ve been teaching people about trauma is that often trauma agitates and triggers old trauma. So, I’m talking to a lot of folks right now who, yes, like, the world is a trash fire right now. But it’s also triggering former workplace trauma that people have experienced, right?

Where they may be at an old job they didn’t feel safe, where they didn’t feel heard. I didn’t feel like they could take care of themselves. And so, it’s kind of bringing up some of those old experiences and those old feelings, and people are feeling frazzled. They don’t really know what to do with it.

A lot of it is equipping people with grounding tools. How to recognize this within yourself versus other people, how to have language that you can use when confronting someone on some of these difficult topics, or if someone is saying something that is triggering, how do you actually have a productive conversation with that person?

Music break 1

Jesse:  You mentioned giving leaders grounding tools to help them ride out whatever shame or other feelings of their own that might come up as they engage with these issues, because it’s much easier to run away from those things if you know, you’re going to have to face your own shit when they come up, right. What is, uh, simple way for people to get started with those grounding practices?

Vivianne: I’ve encouraged leaders to create an emotion journal. So, I have a print out of this emotion wheel. Most people can’t name, a lot of emotions, but, I’ll have them do an assignment where, hey, on Mondays, I want you to take note of the times when you felt happy, where you felt excited or exhilarated, whatever is within that slice of that emotion pie. Or Hey, Wednesday, I want you to reflect on the last 24 hours and think about the times where you felt frustrated or angry or defensive, and what caused that, what was the line of thought that led you there?

It’s an awareness exercise. I think a lot of people don’t pause long enough to learn about themselves, and so I have toolbox of different activities that I share with people of, here are some activities you can do, whether it’s a weekly or daily basis, to help you learn more about you, and help you to earn your PhD in you.

Another thing that I encourage people to do as well is, again, at the end of the day, to have time of reflection.

One particular activity I encourage someone to do was around power dynamics. And so I had them for a few days journal about the different people that they interacted with in their work and whether they had a perception of that person having more power or less power than them. In that conversation, in that relationship, and then talking about the impact that that has and how they talk to that person, their willingness to share ideas with that person and potential barriers to actually hearing from that person.

So yeah, I think some simple activities like that actually go a long, long, long way.

Jesse: It seems like just simply creating the space for reflection, regardless of what the practice is, is a key.

Vivianne: Yeah. And it, it sounds simple, but whew. I mean, even the way we’ve taught folks about UX, that’s not something we teach people. It’s, like, be human-centered, but that whole actually doing the personal work required to truly be human-centered, that’s just kind of, I guess it’s just going to happen.

It’s a given, but it’s something that we actually don’t prioritize and we don’t necessarily view as a part of our professional development or professional competencies. So I think that as a field, we could just do a lot better in recognizing that aspect and how this plays a part in our professional responsibility.

Again, something that I admire about human service professionals is that recognition that, the things that are happening from your personal life outside of the four walls from work impacts the way that you show up in your professional life. Even ethics. Within my master’s in counseling program, that was semester one of my program.

And every semester after that, we always talked about ethics. We always talked about what’s happening in our personal lives and how that impacts our relationship with our work, with our clients, with the experiences that we’re trying to craft and create. And we’re encouraged to be intentional—whether that’s accountability, whether as a counselor to go see another counselor, it’s just viewed as an ethical responsibility, as a professional imperative, actually within our work.

And so it was kind of a culture shock, honestly, to the switch into UX, this field that raves about how human-centered they are, and how little they talked about doing the personal work required to actually be human-centered.

Peter: Right. I mean, for UX it’s all around the methodologies. We learn tools to understand people that aren’t ourselves, to understand other people. I remember back, Jesse, to when you worked on Charmr, and Charmr was a kind of a vision project that Adaptive Path did around diabetes and managing your condition. And I remember the team who was trying to practice good human-centered design, coming back to the office after talking to Type 2 diabetics. And they were wrecked, hearing about the circumstances that these folks were in. And it was the first time I witnessed that, right.

Usually when you’re working in boring software context, trying to help SaaS companies SaaS better, you don’t get that kind of engagement when you’re doing user research. But, we were not set up to enable or support these folks in managing those challenges beyond kind of a generalized, humane awareness of like, “Oh, we should give that person some space to deal with this thing that they’re processing,” kind of separate almost from the work.

So I’m reflecting on how there’ve been moments in my career where I’ve seen it, but it felt like I could, I guess, isolate it on like, “Well, if you’re going to do something that obviously engages with the more challenging parts of human existence, yes. we can be more attuned to that.” And I think what you’re pointing out is, like, basically everything right now is kind of… I guess what I’m realizing is like the moment we encourage us as professionals to engage with people, customers, users, or whatever, there’s a line crossed that we haven’t been aware of where we’re inserting ourselves into somebody else’s context, if we’re doing it right, and are now exposing ourselves to all that stuff. And we have in no way equipped ourselves as a community, as a profession, to handle that even a little bit.

I mean, it’s just not even… I have never heard of… Maybe if you come at it from matters of sociology and anthropology, right? You see some people with user research backgrounds where they’re steeped in ethnography. I’m hoping that those professionals have some awareness. But if you’re coming at it from a interaction design or HCI background, not even, not even beginning to happen.

And what this leads me to wonder is, something we haven’t talked about for a while, but the sense of professionalism and certification for the kind of work we do, so that we are being responsible and making sure that when we’re asking someone to engage in these practices, that they’ve done the work to really ready themselves.

So, I guess I’m wondering, as you’ve shifted from counseling, which seems to have a degree of rigor around this understanding, to now UX and UX research, which clearly lacks it, how would you mature this profession and practice to account for this gap that you’re seeing between the world you came from to the world you’ve stepped into.

Vivianne: Yeah, that’s a great question. The rigor from counseling comes from, again, an understanding of how close we work with people and our ability to cause harm. And again, that’s just something that, when I switched into UX, I’m like, okay, like everyone’s talking about being human-centered, but do they really understand how much power they have in these relationships with people, especially as researchers.

I think that a lot of well-meaning researchers have unfortunately used empathy as a tool to exploit people. And so now, I think a silver lining to 2020, COVID, is people are having to encounter the complexity of people’s humanity, whether that’s within the workplace, outside of the workplace, society or not.

And so when it comes to, What does it look like for us to close this gap? Can I dream? I think that these HCI programs would partner more closely with the human service programs, ideally like counseling and social work.

There are practical ways to understand and increase your competencies when it comes to sensing and responding to people, like, what do you do when you are in a session with someone and they start to just cry. I’ve heard and have read materials from UX leaders who view those emotional outbursts as a badge of honor. And they viewed it as, “Oh, I’m so good at building rapport and empathy with this person. Man, like, I love those moments when participants cry with me.”

And for me, that’s, especially as someone from a counseling background, that’s a very dangerous mindset to have, or hope to affirm that you are really good at building empathy and rapport. And the reason why is, because for all you know, you have not only triggered someone into emotional distress, but you actually probably don’t have the tools or the training to usher them out of that, to ground them before they leave your presence and go back on with the rest of their day.

And we have an ethical responsibility to make sure that we are caring for our participants when they are with us and when we’re doing research sessions with them.

I do think we need to work more closely with human service professionals like counselors and social workers. I personally think that there should be some element of continuing education that comes from specifically, again, human service classes and courses around this.

I think unfortunately we do a lot of navel-gazing. We don’t lean as much on other industries and professions who have actually done deep work in being human-centered. And the other thing that can help close the gap is, especially from leaders who already have a level of recognition and sway in the industry, to step up and actually start asking those questions, do your own research, and take your own initiative and share what you’re learning.

And come from a place of humility, not a place of, “I’m a leader. And, I’m an expert in all these things,” but help us industry learn how to be humble again. ‘Cause we’re not a humble industry. I think pride is one of the greatest occupational hazards for UX professionals, because it really blinds us from doing the work that could prevent us from causing harm to other people.

Peter: You mentioned power and, power is a big factor here, something that you pointed out that I don’t think we understand is the power that we wield as designers. Because it’s a step removed, we’re like, “I don’t have power. I just make a thing.”

Human service industry folks recognize that power because they’re dealing with that person face to face, or maybe in a small group. It’s very in the moment. Maybe through user research, you have a little bit of that. You’re not actually trying to make a change, usually,  with user research, you’re there to observe and take in.

And so I don’t think we recognize, one, even that context, there’s a weird power dynamic going on that probably needs to be acknowledged. But then, two, the ultimate impact of the work that proceeds and how it is a reflection of the power dynamic between the organization producing the service the people who are receiving it. So there’s that part of the power dynamic.

Something else that I was wondering was in the internal work that’s happening, something I’m sensitive to, as a leader, is if I try to facilitate conversations, because I’m the one with power, I don’t think the conversations are going to be necessarily as open and honest and good, because I fear, as a leader, people will take cues from me, even if I’m trying to be the avuncular sweater-wearing groovy guy, who’s just, like, wants to rap with you about what we’re dealing with.

People know that I’m the VP and they’re not, and I can fire them or whatever those dynamics are. And so I’m wondering what counsel you have in terms of approaching these matters internally, so that power doesn’t overwhelm honesty and authenticity when, people are trying to engage in these conversations.

Vivianne: Yeah, that’s a great question. And before I get to that, you talked about power with the researcher-participant relationship, there’s so much power there that we should talk more about. I have power, in that I know exactly where this interview, where I want it to go and where I’m going to take you. That’s power.

I have power in the types of questions I want to ask, what emotional heartstrings, emotional responses I might want to hear from you. Some personal stories. My participant is unaware of the amount of emotional labor that I might be asking them to do in my session.

Something that I tell people, too, is, Hey, when you’re doing interviews with folks, don’t wear an Apple watch, don’t wear your, like, nice, expensive jewelry or, have your, what, like $20,000 piece of artwork in the back, whatever it is. Those are power signals, ‘cause you don’t know that person, their background, what they’ve been through. So if you’re having on a call with them, whether it’s remote or, back in the day, in person, and you roll up with your Starbucks cup, you have your Apple watch on, nd, you’re just dressed to the nines, that introduces a unique power dynamic between you and that person.

I have a checklist of things that I do before my interviews. I’ll jot down, What am I bringing into this interview? What assumptions may I already have about this person in this interview and how might that influence the way I’m going to interact with them? And what ways am I going to try and mitigate the power dynamic in this interview?

So I, mentally and emotionally, walk through that so that I can try and mitigate that, or at least be aware of it as much as possible in my time with that participant.

You asked a question about, the internal approach to power, specifically with leaders and how they show up with their teams. Easier said than done, but man, one of the quickest ways to mitigate that power is to be vulnerable.

And, wow, leaders, like, it’s tough. It’s tough. And I get it, because there are written and unwritten rules of leadership, right? Things that we’ve been told of how we’re supposed to show up, how we’re supposed to lead, how we’re supposed to assure people that things are okay.

But some of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in the workplace is… I remember being on a call with an executive. This was in June. A white man. And, they’re thinking about Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and they cried. And I was, like, Whoa. This is, like, it’s a reminder of, like, Oh, okay. Like, executives are people, too. Like, there’s something, there’s a commonality that we have between us, beyond we work at the same company. So moments of vulnerability.

There are moments to acknowledge and surface other moments of connection between you and people who have less power than you. So, I have been on calls with executives where I always ask people, “How are you doing today?” ‘Cause I know it’s a day-by-day thing. And then, “How are you doing in general?” Like, that’s how I always phrase up that question with people. And I remember talking to an executive and they’re like, “Honestly, not good, not good today. This is happening, this is happening, and I’m not going to lie—I just don’t want to be at work today.” And this is someone who has more power than me. And I just told them, “Hey, I really appreciate you sharing that.” It makes me feel like I can be more real and honest, not only with leaders, but even my other colleagues, right.

Because leaders are modeling how to show up to colleagues, that we have similar power dynamics, so it’s a trickle-down effect. So I say, one, I think vulnerability is really important. Two, I think, modeling behavior that, again, shows that you are aware of others and what others might be going through.

So, I had an executive, who maybe only gave a few days’ notice, but it was like, “Hey, I need time off.” And they took a week off. Family and your wellbeing comes first, and everything else comes together. Not second. And I was like, great. Like that, for me, is a moment of mitigating power because now I’m giving myself more permission to show up in a way that’s authentic, that’s real about how I’m doing and where I’m at. And even in the midst of a project, if I need to step aside for a little bit, that’s going to help me and my teammates figure out, where to pick up the slack.

How do we continue this momentum of collaboration instead of me just operating on E and it’s stifling the project that we’re working on together.

Music break 2

Jesse: You talked about bringing people together around these issues. And one thing I think that happens within teams is people experience their own individual traumas, and then had to take them home with them, or, at best, maybe it comes up in a one-on-one with their manager at some point. And I wonder if there are ways that teams can collectively create more resilience. We talk about creating a culture for design within organizations that is a little bit of a safe space for risk, a safe place for exploring creative possibility, those kinds of safety, and my thesis is that you don’t get those kinds of safety unless you also have these other kinds of safety.

Is it entirely on the manager and their individual relationships with team members to create that? Or is there some holistic way that it can be addressed almost at the organizational level?

Vivianne: I think it’s both, I think managers play a huge role and, creating that type of environment. And really, when we talk about safety, we talk about vulnerability, we’re really talking about trust, and extending trust because you can’t have safety, vulnerability, without it. Managers play a huge role in that, how they show up, how they address teams in trying times. Even right now, with everything that’s going on in America, if you’re a manager and you haven’t addressed it, you better believe that you are creating a less safe environment for your team to talk about real things that are impacting them and might be impacting their work and work productivity. So yes, managers have a huge part to play.

I think, too, there are certain things that you can do at a team level, where everyone is contributing to also creating that space. So, an activity that I’ve done on teams, this is something that I’ve also encouraged and done within Humanity Centered, which is our online course in community for folks in UX who want to do more of this deeper work, is we do something called a “check-in check-in.”

So for example, with Humanity Centered, we have folks who go through their own self-assessment on where they are, and comfort level talking about some of these topics that we’re talking about today, when it comes to being able to have human-centered conversations and profit-centric conversations, the ability to talk about white supremacy and privilege and design, et cetera, et cetera.

So, we ended up having these small groups that, through that self-assessment, we group people accordingly, and then we’ve had them doing this activity that we call the “check-in check-in.” So, “check-in check-in.” Basically, you have three minutes, and everyone goes in this small group. I’ve even done this with teams at work. And you start off the sentence with, “If you were to truly know me,” and then you just talk about what’s on your mind, whether that’s work stuff. It’s, “If you were to truly know me, this weekend was really great. I was able to go into social distance, walk with so-and-so,” or, “I’m actually not fully present because of A, B and C going on.”

And it just a time for people just to share what’s on their mind and what’s on their heart. And, there’s three minutes and it’s… let’s say that person only wants to talk for two, then that remaining one minute is, everyone just kind of sits in silence and waits for the timer to run out.

And then we give the group two minutes to respond. So, if you want to respond to that person, then you’d throw out the sentence with, “When I heard you say, blank blank blank. It made me think about,” or “made me feel” whatever it is. And so just an activity to help people, again, foster that element of safety and trust and vulnerability.

Some people will share more, so people will share less, but it’s about creating that mutual respect for where people are at. And even just knowing how to better check up on your colleague and to show up with each other in the workplace.

In the beginning of projects, encouraging folks to create what we call an alliance, where, before you kick off this project, let’s say it’s you, another researcher, and three designers, and you’re having a meeting where you’re talking about, What are the expectations for how we each think we should show up on this project? What are the things that you should know about me in order to get the best working experience with me? What’s our role, what are the roles that we’re going to agree to? If there’s disagreement? And, how do we want to figure out how much time do we want to spend on this or not?

So we’re not spinning endlessly, my team, we have a rule. It’s called the “fucks given” rule. So, basically, like, we find ourselves on this problem, and we’re like spinning in debating it. And then we put it to a vote: Out of fucks given, where are you at? You at a hundred? Are you at zero? So, we got to figure out, can we just move us on? Is it really like a life or death thing? I’ll always say things like, “Hey, this is something I’m not willing to die on the hill on, but I do think it’s important.” So just being able to quickly suss out and agree how we want to handle conflict before a project is huge.

And that is a part of creating safe spaces and a safe environment. So, there’s a lot of things, and even rituals, activities people can do.

Jesse: Having tried to implement some vulnerability rituals inside a design organization, I found the degree of buy-in to be widely varying in terms of people’s willingness to be a part of those kinds of things, or to engage with them at more than, a superficial level.

Vivianne: For some companies and teams, that’s a culture shift. What do you mean trust? What do you mean, like, actually being more human to each other? And so some of it takes time, and one of the biggest detriments to the teams, when it comes to this type of work, is they’re, like, “What’s the easy, simple thing I can do tomorrow and everyone will be bought in?” We’re complex people. So, this takes time for some teams, it means that there needs to actually be a deeper conversation about what are the barriers to trust or humility within the team and the culture.

I’ve had teams where they bring in a third-party person to help facilitate those conversations. And I think more teams honestly, should think about doing that.

Peter: Almost every team I work with is stretched too thin, not enough people to do the work that is expected of them.

If I were to bring some of this wisdom back to other folks, the response would likely be, “We just don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to do the things that are expected of me. And now you want me to make time to do these things as well.”

Rituals is probably a way to think about this. I think too often we do events. We’re going to do a two-day workshop. We’re going to get everybody in a room. We’re going to bring in a facilitator, who’s going to help you better understand trauma, self-care, whatever it is. We’re talking about emotional honesty, et cetera.

And then that person’s going to leave, and we’re never going to talk about it again. As opposed to, thinking about it less as an event, and more like, start small, What are rituals, like the check-in check-out, that you can intersperse, and after a while it won’t feel like extra, it’ll just be the work.

Vivianne: I agree. It’s, What are the small things that you can start to implement and build habits on? If the problem is, you’ve been eating like shit, the last six months you’ve gained the COVID 30, we’re going to bring in fitness instructor and do a half-day workout session, and then you’re going to go on with your life. That’s not gonna really cause change anywhere. It’s a Band-Aid on a much larger problem.

Especially now, ‘cause I’m thinking about the context of trauma, I’m thinking about the context of compassion fatigue. Especially when you’re thinking about things like creating equitable and inclusive experiences in design. And I’m thinking about what’s happened this year, I’m thinking about June.

And the reality is, just to be blunt, that white people aren’t used to sitting and suffering in pain this long about race and racism. And so white people are tired, you are tired when it comes to talking about race and racism and caring about people. And so I’m just aware, people are tired, people are traumatized.

So, I always encourage teams, think about one or two things that you can do that start to build this muscle, because this is a muscle, right? To your point, you can’t just have a one, two-day workshop and then you don’t talk about it ever again. It’s a muscle that you have to build.

And I encourage people to build it slow, but be intentional when you’re building it. So, I’m being intentional. Make sure that the habits that you’re implementing are life giving and are actually contributing to increasing an environment of trust and vulnerability. Resist the temptation to feel like you need to study and cram for this invisible exam that I guess everyone has to go through next week. This is something that takes time. I think people really get frustrated with that because they’re, like, “Well, I just want to do everything right now and get it over with.”

But this is a lifelong process and experience as well. You may start at this company and continue with at a different one.

Especially in Corporate America, where capitalism honestly depends on the system not fully acknowledging your humanity in order to make more money. So, you have to think about, what are small habits and rituals that can start to disrupt that, and have us move towards a more holistically human-centered approach to ourselves, so that we can apply that approach to other people as well.

Peter: One of the things we didn’t quite get to is: let’s say UX Research, the profession that you are now in, should that be certified? Should you need a certification to practice UX research? Should there be unions to support UX researchers? Should there be these professional structures to address some of the things we’re talking about, because right now, UX researchers, literally anyone can call themselves that.

Vivianne: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s in the form of certification. I don’t know if it’s in the form of committees, but I do definitely think there needs to be a level of accountability in the field. Less around accountability of personas and journey maps and jobs-to-be-done, and more of, like, do you know how to not cause harm to people when you’re with them?

Jesse: Right. Yeah.

Peter: Norms no longer work. Norms are done. Norms have just proven themselves too easy to exploit, and our practice, our industry is built on norms. And, how do we start turning norms into standards, into reasonable expectations, because of the influence, the power, that our work has.

Vivianne: I agree. And I think that the voices that need to be leading that conversation or should be at least helping to shape what those norms are, should be folks who are underrepresented or marginalized. Because if you’re able to design well for marginalized, underrepresented voices in communities everyone else is going to benefit.

So if there was new UX certification, and it was being led by a bunch of white men in UX, I’d be crushed. So, it’s understanding, too, does it look like for us to actually reflect the sentiment of being inclusive and human-centered, and even our approach to designing accountability, and especially now, I think if people were more aware of trauma, then you wouldn’t have people doing things like, I don’t know, scheduling user research interviews during election week. No one cares, why are people doing that?

Peter: The information you’re going to get is not going to be… yeah, what are you going to do with that?

Jesse: Believe me. I was doing a user research study in September of 2001. I know.

Vivianne: Or even just what if, instead of paying people the typical way we pay participants, we pay them based on the level of emotional labor that we’re going to be expecting them to give to us in this time, what would it look like to reevaluate how we compensate?

There’s a lot of room growth with that. I get a lot of DMs and messages from folks who just had never had the language for trauma, for compassion fatigue, for understanding the difference between stress and traumatic stress and how you treat them very differently.

And, I’ve had folks who have left UX and they’re like, “Wow, if I knew those things, I think I would have been able to get help and, you know, maybe we had more of a sustainable career.” So, this is also about, you want to have a sustainable and long career in UX. We have to start having more conversations about this.

Jesse: I’d love to, in our last couple of minutes, just hear a little bit about Humanity Centered because, I think you’re taking an interesting approach to how you’re structuring, getting this knowledge and these skills out into the world.

Vivianne: Yeah, so Humanity Centered, so we’re a community of what I feel are some of the most supportive, growth-oriented minds in the UX field. And these folks are coming together because we want to learn how to lean into new conversations with openness and courage, and really how to transform the status quo of what it means to be human-centered in our work, our industry, and our professional lives, by doing more of personal work required to do our best professional work.

So, the way that we’ve structured this is, oftentimes when it comes to conversations about creating equitable and inclusive experiences, or influencing power in the workplace, a lot of people tend to treat those conversations and that journey as a solo one. But in reality, this, we believe in our philosophy that growth is best experienced in a shared journey. We have a five-week course that’s taught live. And we also have people split into small groups. And that way, too, we give people time to meet with other people from different countries, different journeys in their UX experience, different companies. But we design those pods to make sure that people are getting the best experience possible from this community.

So, we have people do self-assessments to better understand where they are and their confidence and ability to have conversations about, inclusive and equitable design with their colleagues to influence stakeholders, to have more human-centered conversations.

And we’re grouping them together with other folks who are in not only similar places of their journey, but with folks that are going to help them grow in their goals that they want to achieve from being a part of this community and course.

So, in this, during the modules, we talked about things like barriers and resistances to cultural humility and competencies. We get super practical when it comes to, What does it mean to be ethical? Not even from a team standpoint, from an organizational standpoint.

And we start to question current conversations in the field, like, Should we be focused more on not causing harm or focus more on causing more good? And what is that mindset shift? How does that influence the way we approach product UX? So we had our first cohort that wrapped up actually on Sunday.

We’re having our second cohort start, end of January. We’ve been really excited to have some amazing corporate partners, and sponsors to help us with this work. And for us, any partnership and corporate sponsorship money we receive, we put it back in a hundred percent into scholarships.

We are convicted about the importance of having the most diverse and inclusive community within UX, and it’s been a really hot, awesome, awesome experience. We have folks, obviously, from the States, from Canada, we have folks from Costa Rica, from Ireland, from Kenya. We have folks from all over. We have, one student who literally wakes up at 2:00 AM their time to join us. And so, we’re working on how to make it more accessible, more global as well. And it’s been, honestly, just like a gift in such a chaotic year. So that’s what we’re about.

Peter: That’s awesome.

Jesse: Wow. That sounds really great.

Vivianne: Type in humanitycentered.com, whether that’s centered spelled from UK English, or American English, it will kick you to our website so you can learn more about the courses, learn more about the community and, I’ll see you there.

Jesse: Thank you so much for being with us.

Peter: This has definitely been, I’ll say mind opening, not even eye-opening, so thank you.

Vivianne: Thank you.

Jesse: And that concludes another episode of Finding Our Way. You can find Vivianne Castillo on LinkedIn, as well as on medium. She’s also on Twitter @vcastillo360. You can find Peter and myself on Twitter as well. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. Please feel free to yell at us in public. We love it. If you prefer to yell at us in private, you can do that too. Using the feedback form on the website for this podcast, at http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find every episode and transcripts.

We’ll see you next time.

Jen: Dysfunction in scrum teams or in product teams starts at the very beginning. It starts when people don’t agree on the problem that they’re solving, never mind the solution that’s being designed.

Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

And we’re Finding Our Way…

Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, veteran UX research leader, Jen Cardello of Fidelity Investments, joins us to talk about building teams, building relationships, building credibility, and building the case for human centered practices.

Jesse: Part of the reason why I was interested in talking with you is that, what we’ve heard and what we’ve seen, is that there are a wide variety of answers to the question of where research should sit within an organization. And we’ve heard from folks about research being more strongly aligned with product research, being more strongly aligned with the business side of things, research being, in some cases. completely separate from a design group and almost like a peer or a service to a design group.

And so I’m curious about all of these different approaches, what you’ve seen work and what you’ve seen has created challenges, in terms of just simply from an organizational perspective, where does research belong, and the different answers to that question?

Jen: Those are great questions. I guess it depends on the maturity of the organization and what outcomes it’s looking for. So, if you’re looking for research mainly to provide proof points to shore up a design group that might have a little bit of credibility issue that it’s trying to build, oftentimes you see those UX researchers living in design because they’re trying to structure an ecosystem of tests that generate evidence, that helps the designers stand behind the cases they’re trying to make, for the change they’re trying to see in the product and the experiences.

That can be really uncomfortable because it becomes very apparent very quickly to the product organization, maybe the engineers, maybe leadership, that those researchers, they may be working as hard as they can not to have bias, but purely by the way their function has been put in the organization, it becomes clear what’s happening there. So, In the organization I’m in now, research, all forms of research— which includes my partners in market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty—we sit outside of marketing and outside of design. And that is to ensure that those research techniques and our work isn’t weaponized by those organizations. That’s the intent at least.

Peter: So, this is a trend I’ve been seeing, increasingly, for research to be its own group. What I would call a kind of 360-degree group, that incorporates market research, user research, I think you said analytics or data science. Some teams have, customer service and support, or a connection there at least.

I like the idea that you don’t want research to be weaponized by whatever group that it’s part of. And I’m a fan of holism. And so having one research group that has all these different modes of inquiry, methodology, interrogation, makes a lot of sense to me. But how do you avoid, then, research being seen as simply an internal consulting practice that’s not invested in the day-to-day warp and weft of these teams that are trying to deliver new value?

Jen: Yeah, so that’s part of the alignment strategy. We address that with the org design of the research organization. So I have those four peers, market research, behavioral economics, brand and advertising research, customer loyalty. My group is the largest of those and it spreads out over four business units.

We use Spotify-esque language at Fidelity, to talk about the way we’re organized, from an agile perspective. So we have, at the lowest atomic level, I guess, of organization would be the squad. A group of squads is a tribe, a group of tribes is a domain and a business unit has multiple domains.

And what we’ve tried to do is align our research pods, which would be like three or four researchers focused against a domain and a domain could be something as big as, wealth management, or it could be digitization of service. It could be financial wellness. So these are big themes. And we’ll have a small group of researchers working on that theme in that domain.

And that domain might have 50, 60 squads. We’re not embedded at the squad level, there’s not enough of us to do that. We have about a 15 to one ratio of squads to researchers, but that allows us to float at a higher altitude to see where there’s things that we might need to really understand about financial wellness from a right problem-right solution-done right aspect, which is the other piece of it. How do we classify the type of work we’re doing for the teams? We do have specialization, I guess. So it would be aligned to themes of the business and how they think about bringing themselves and representing themselves into the market.

Jesse: It sounds like you have a degree of control over your own research agenda, independent of what the teams are asking of you. It’s one of the things that you see in these organizations where there is this high level of specialization across the teams, is that any issue that doesn’t clearly fall into one of your tiny buckets doesn’t get addressed, But it sounds like you have some latitude to do some more overarching research work that touches a broader range of the experience that your customers are having.

Jen: Yeah, that is true. There’s a balance between proactive and reactive work. In my dream situation, about 80% of the work we’re doing is proactive. It’s work that we have discovered a need to be done because we’re interacting with the business leaders and product owners and the tribe leads, and figuring out what their big initiatives are that they’re going after so that we can lock arms with them and seeing them through right problem, right solution and done right. So it’s this holistic relationship of getting them from that fuzzy state of not knowing where to go and what to focus on and what unmet needs are there, and then starting to ideate and test out solutions and then to fine tune that design. So we’d like to see 80% of our work surfaced and commissioned in that sense.

And then 20% of our capacity is supposed to be reserved for reactive work because you can’t push that away. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be a team that says, “We need to present something. We actually need to get it in front of users.” You know, it’s more of a checkbox type of engagement.

But, you know, researchers can get really depressed if a hundred percent of their life is checkbox engagements, because it doesn’t really feel genuine, that people really want us there. They’re having us there as a CYA. So yeah, the ideal is that 80/20 relationship. It’s not quite there yet, but we can very crisply identify what things we’re working on that are part of those big initiatives tied to the four business units.

Jesse: Are you actively seeking out business sponsors for that work or, if it’s not originating from the teams, how do you make the case to be able to do the work?

Jen: Yeah, so there’s some work that we are actually driving and saying, this is an initiative of insights gathering and harvesting that we think could feed many teams. And we think it’s important to do, versus there’s some big initiative that already has a business sponsor.

And we’re saying, “Hey, we can help you guys. So why don’t we talk about how we might, I might be able to go, take you through an innovation swim lane or through transformation swim lane and show you what that would look like” and have them say, “Yeah, come on in, join the team.” So when we are suggesting things, for example, trying to lay out a landscape of insights by using Jobs theory, maybe even as specifically as outcome-driven-innovation, it is important for us to shop around and find the domains or business units and executives who say, “Yes, I do believe this is important and we should have some researchers working on that.”

So we’ve been able to make a couple things happen that way, particularly when we’re talking about jobs and, we call it the Atlas, which is, basically, providing a landscape to look across from a segment and jobs perspective in order to plot insights that we know, and places where there’s white space, where we really don’t know, and we could do research in those areas.

So the Atlas is a very meta thing. We had to go and get sponsorship to even do the research around creating the Atlas. Hopefully the Atlas itself will provide us with that mechanism to point to white space and say, “Hey leadership, wouldn’t it be great if we actually could turn that box green, because we knew things about that.”

There may be opportunities living in there that we haven’t surfaced before.

Peter: The map is the territory. When you’re saying “jobs,” I believe you’re referring to jobs-to-be-done jobs, and I know that…And it sounds like you’re continuing to have success with the Jobs-to-be-done framework. I’m probably going to misrepresent Jared Spool, but he’s been a bit of a jobs-to-be-done naysayer, not that he thinks there’s anything wrong with it, but he just thinks it’s old wine in new bottles. Nothing about jobs-to-be-done that hadn’t already been practiced by good user researchers in the past. I’m wondering what you’re seeing in terms of jobs-to-be-done as a framework, as interface and interpretation layer between the work of research and others, that has been particularly helpful.

Jen: There are numerous reasons based on different company pathologies, where jobs has been helpful. Outcome-driven-innovation was useful at Athena because the product owners were really struggling to establish ownership over prioritization. They were very vulnerable to having their prioritization of feature functionality and value creation, being completely upended by leadership at any given moment.

And so having something quantitative to point at, to identify where there were unmet needs, that presented opportunities for us to go after, gave them much stronger standing in and have that conviction about the prioritization they had picked. And it’s forged a very strong partnership between strategic design and product at Fidelity.

Jesse: You’ve talked a bit about the use of quantitative methods as a way of forging these relationships and strengthening the case for the business value of various initiatives, but also of research itself. And I wonder where the qualitative fits into this.

Tell me about the insights part of the equation and how’s that going in terms of making the case for people to listen to what you’re coming up with.

Jen: Yes, absolutely. So there’s the framework that we use: Right problem, right solution,  done right. And right problem, we have this model, it doesn’t always get followed exactly, but it’s a model that we look to as a north star, and it’s a qual-quant-qual sandwich.

And the qual in the beginning, the first phase of qual is really starting to understand where there may be openings of opportunity. People think something’s very important, but they’re not very satisfied with this thing. So we’re trying to flesh out a job map and areas of opportunity by doing that really deep high-quality qualitative work.

We can create a job map, which would take us into a quantitative phase of running ODI or jobs-to-be-done work. So that instrument that’s generated is really well-informed and people have really listened and understood the stories of the people that we’re talking about. But that’s not the end. It’s not that you just get the data from jobs-to-be-done.

And then all of a sudden, you know what you need to go build. It’s surfacing outcome statements, which essentially are unmet needs. And then we’re going to go back in and do more qual, because we want to understand the root cause behind those things bubbling up in the opportunity scores. We really want to get at, like, where is this thing broken? Where’s the friction? So that in Right Problem is very important that you have qual bookends.

And then in Right Solution, we’ve been getting much more specific in how we utilize qual and quant, not just in UXR, but also with our market research partners to build a very strong approach to encouraging divergent thinking. Screening many ideas through quant, doing qualitative resonance testing, very thick data, high-value, qualitative interviews. And then once we’re narrowed down on some concepts, then doing market potential assessment, which is way more rigorous and way more quantitative. So, we’re increasing amount of rigor depending on the uncertainty and risk that we are facing, but we’re still having that healthy idea harvesting and idea generation that we need to see teams engaging in so that they have a higher likelihood of success.

So we’re mixing qual and quant, and we’re also partnering very intensely with the other research disciplines to do that properly.

Jesse: I’m curious about that relationship because that’s not really one that I had considered, the relationship that you might have with other research functions in the organization, which might have very different cultures of research and ways of thinking about how you tackle these kinds of problems, how’s that going in terms of the push and pull and striking a balance with your other research partners. I have worked with some market researchers that had a hard time understanding product research. Like they did not have mindset for it. And maybe the culture of your organization is different from that.

Jen: It was new to me when I came to the organization because at previous places we didn’t have strong and developed mature market research practices. So building that relationship has been a great deal Of the effort. We’ve put a lot of effort into that understanding where there’s give and take, where there’s things that they can own entirely where things that UXR can own entirely.

And where is it great for us to partner? one of our great achievements is saying like, we know how to get through right. Solution together. Yeah. It’s very exciting. but yeah, I have been learning so much about market research that I did not know. It was very enlightening to me and very humbling because I just didn’t understand, all of the techniques, like, you know, when people start talking about monadic concept tests and, Volume metrics.

I was like, aha. You know, nodding my head and then, you know, quickly Googling things. It’s just intense, in large field with very specific techniques that have been, very well honed over the years. So It’s becoming more and more of a thing that UX researchers really should understand.

And if you’re building a research org from scratch, you want market researchers on your team. The quantitative work alone is incredibly intense and valuable. But then also they have qualitative techniques and they have honed qualitative techniques that may be slightly different than the way we come at it in UXR.

So I’ve been learning a lot and they’ve been learning a lot from us. The other really important partnership, though, has been the behavioral economics group, which–wow. That is like an absolute, superpower, being able to carve out experiments from a behavioral economics perspective to test certain hypotheses and experience strategies is just absolutely mind-boggling. I have been really impressed with that partnership and whenever we have the opportunity we’re embedding our UX researchers in those projects so that they can learn.

Peter:  Did this research team exist as it is before you joined, and you joined to lead part of it, or did it assemble Avengers-style once you came on the scene and there was the right, I dunno, mix of leaders and functions? What was that insight in creating this independent research team?

 Jen: So, prior to my arrival, UX Research had lived in UX Design and when the first business unit went through the agile transformation process, they moved it. They moved UX research into this research and insights organization. So, when I joined the UXR org had already lived for six months in that research and insights organization.

Peter: Got it. Interesting. That’s possibly the only good thing to have ever come out of an agile transformation.

Jen: it is, it really is. And beyond my four peer groups, we live in the data organization. So we live with analytics, with AI, with measurement. Usually when you’re thinking about, like, we need data around such and such, or I need metrics, the first thing you have to figure out is how to harvest that information, how to create a system to collect that data and then to analyze it.

But more times than not that data already exists. It’s a matter of finding it and then packaging it up in the way that we need to. But because we live in that org, a superpower we have had to develop is to know what are all the types of data that we have, who are all the people that own it and manage it and play with it? How do we get access to it? So it’s definitely like a kid in a candy shop situation, when you don’t have to actually be creating all the instruments to collect the data, but you do have to get really good at networking and knowing all the players.

Music break 1

Peter: So one of the challenges a lot of design leaders face, including a company I’m working with right now, is the reduction of design to that which can move measurement. “We’re going to do AB testing, and the best design is the one that succeeds based on whatever measurement we had decided was what we were going for.”

And when that happens, when design gets reduced to moving needles, there is a qualitative, experiential component that gets lost, that I think we all recognize the value of, but it’s hard to measure. And, I’m wondering if this set-up, UXR within a data team with a lot of quantitative researchers, that happens to the qualitative research that you’re working on, because it’s looser, more nebulous, more amorphous, less easy to reduce. How you protect, you mentioned thick data, that richness of that thick data, in the possible onslaught of metrics and numbers that others are wielding?

Jen: I’m working on a project right now that is an experience transformation project. And we’ve been partnered. We created a virtual squad between all the quants and the qual researchers. So that, we could approach building a holistic measurement strategy. And one of the things that we did was, we set timeframes around measurement of the metrics.

Like when should we be able to measure this change? Because one of the things I think is very dangerous, is looking for those short-term gains like the needle moving, ‘cause I put something in the market two weeks ago. That’s really dangerous. And so building up that it’s a roadmap of measurement to see, like, we probably won’t see this needle move for another year, just to set expectations.

So don’t ask me to be measuring that next month because we don’t expect it to move, but we do expect these things to happen. One of the interesting things that I’ve seen, this is Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion who teach product management, they had this really nice webinar where they talked about three levels of metrics and they had these traction metrics, which is, “I got the person to click on the thing.” They had product metrics, which is, like, something about adoption engagement, like actually using the thing to get something done. And then business metrics, which would be those way bigger needles to move, which are like satisfaction and NPS, operating income, new money, those types of things.

And being able to really identify when should you see those things and how are they actually correlated as leading indicators of lagging outcomes? We spent, at least two months working on creating that model of how we should measure this transformation and experience.

That’s the type of attention that we need to pay. And one of our partners is the AB testing team and they’re all in on that because they don’t want to be setting up these little itty-bitty AB tests that are supposed to be showing big change, and they’re basically not detecting any statistical difference. They want to be called in when it’s significant enough to make it worth their while to work on that. So we are building these measurement models and we are using very specific words. So just a couple of weeks ago I was correcting people. They were talking about a beta test and I said, “I don’t want to use the word test here. This isn’t a test.” What we’re trying to do is collect and harvest feedback that the creators of this experience can use to fine tune the design. This is not a test. This isn’t go/no-go. It’s not, it’s good, it’s bad. It’s actually a mechanism for generating useful, articulate, guidance that we can use to make this thing better.

Jesse: I’m struck by what seems like the breadth of your mandate, which feels unusual to me, maybe not that unusual for an organization of your scale, but it still feels like it is more common for me to talk to research managers where research is really kind of boxed in to delivering a specific kind of data or insight back to the organization, and the organization is not really interested in hearing about anything that is outside that box that was whatever the box that was originally established for them. Or sometimes what happens is that a research organization will be established with a broad mandate and then that mandate will get whittled down over time to the most provable forms of research, and those are the only ones that the organization is willing to continue to fund. From the perspective of a research manager who is in that situation, how do I start trying to create some more space, to try some new things, to take some chances with what I’m doing with the research that push beyond those expectations that I’ve been boxed into.

Jen: Well, there is some things that we do as researchers that are that basic kit of parts. Take evaluative research, for example, like someone shows up to you and says, “I want to usability test.” That’s great. That’s good work. That’s interesting. But there’s a point at which, in an organization, you’ve been doing usability tests for 20 years. Could we teach some other people to do that? And if we were able to give them that capability with that, help them learn faster and would that free up some of our capacity to do those other things, like to do more Right Problem and Right Solution work. And then could we get some of that Right Problem, Right Solution work and have some wins that we can show the organization, look, this is really interesting stuff on this team. We partnered with them on right problem.

We were able to unsurface these opportunities and they were able to take that into co-creation and be hugely productive and put something in market. So you want to make space for your team so that they’re not on a hamster wheel. And you do that by multiplying their capability by giving some of it away.

And then you want to find partners, either design leaders or product leaders, who are interested in that thick data and interested in that more intense collaborative, and you lock arms and you find opportunities to show some wins. So that’s basic playbook. And I know that every organization is different, so making that happen can be difficult in some organizations that may be very adamant about their perspective as research as a lobster tank or, you know, just a shared service that they get tests from. But like I said, that word “tests” is what sets you up down that path, too. So, choosing different vocabulary to display or explain the value you can have is even a little baby step, but shifting that vocabulary can help a great deal too.

Peter: The lobster tanks suggests a certain New England frame of reference that perhaps you’re operating within. I’m also wondering if there’s something about the culture of the product or organization that you can attribute to the broader mandate that you’re realizing. What is it about Fidelity that has created this space, this opportunity for research to have this far broader than typical mandate.

Jen: Well, this was an organization that was going through a transformation, and was fully invested in change. Like change is hard, but we have to go start setting down this path to do this. And so they already in that growth mindset and wanting to do things differently than they had done them in the past.

So I’m lucky, my timing is lucky, right? Because I show up and they’re like, “We want change. Can you give us change?” And I’m like, well, if you shaped it like this, that’s dramatically different. It gets you insights versus tests versus just strictly validation. So how can we mold ourselves, create an organization that makes that happen?

So they have an appetite for change, and they’re willing to be a little uncomfortable with that for awhile. So that helps. And then the other thing is, this organization is so obsessed with learning. We actually have learning days. Every Tuesday is a learning day. They’re really adamant about people building their T-shaped skillsets.

And they’re adamant about career mobility as well. So when we propose the idea of research democratization, we didn’t have a bunch of people saying, “Uh, not my job. I don’t want to do that.” We had people queuing up. We had a backlog, we had a line, a waiting list that was months long for people to get into the program, to learn how to run evaluative studies on their own.

And then the way we were able to frame that was by talking about a measurement called learning velocity that we invented, saying, how fast is your team able to learn? If you get in our backlog, you could be waiting a month before you get some insights from that little test you want it to run, but if you can do it yourself, you can do it in three days.

And so the whole idea of like, ooh, more learning, more insights, this is a culture that is hungry for that all the time. And they’re hungry for growing their skill sets. So it’s, like, that perfect storm, but in a very positive way,

Peter: Fidelity is a large mature private company, right? So you’re not dealing with the public markets. You’re not dealing with quarterly earnings. You’re not dealing with that hamster wheel that I think so many people face and which narrows or limits the focus, I think is probably a better way to think about it.

Jen: Yeah, you end up with a lot of short, short-term focused initiatives that are looking for a fast hit oftentimes in public-held companies. In a privately held company, there is patience and persistence.

So you think of investor mindset. We are the perfect company to talk about investor mindset. It’s basically how we’ve stayed in business for 75 years. That and exceptional customer service and relationships that we build with our customers. So we’re willing to make bets on things that may not bear fruit for a year, five years, 10 years. That’s okay with a private company.

Peter: You’ve used, it’s almost a mantra, Right Problem, Right Solution, Done Right. Was this something that existed before you joined, is this something you helped generate? Is this something you used in the past?

Jen: I brought it with me and, as I’ve mentioned, in other talks that I’ve given, it’s standing on the shoulders of giants because it’s inspired by double diamond and inspired by, “build the right thing, build the thing right,” in my work with the amazing team at Athena, too.

But it was a really nice way for me to frame conversations with folks about what it was that was valuable to them and, how we, as researchers, could help them. And it had that effect of having people question whether they actually had a right problem that they were going after.

So it started to, like, probe in the direction of teams starting to have that self-awareness they feel very adamant about having that right problem defined. So it is kind of like a rallying cry for people now. And it’s very common to hear product owners and other participants in the process who aren’t researchers talking about Right Problem, Right Solution, Done Right.

Peter: You mentioned double diamond. if I understand it right, the Right Problem would be almost this diamond zero before double diamond. Is that fair or…?

Jen: Yeah, I think that’s very fair. Yeah, I mean that right problem and diamond zero, it’s one of the most important aspects of ensuring team functionality. So, like, dysfunction in scrum teams or in product teams starts at the very beginning. It starts when people don’t agree on the problem that they’re solving, never mind the solution that’s being designed.

And so you want to get really crisp, and be super articulate about that problem that we’re solving and who we’re solving for, and falling in love with that problem, because once the team moves into right solution, people feel super energized and capable, and they have agency for creating many solutions, which we know increases their likelihood of success when they put a product in market.

Music break 2

Peter: Research, done right, doesn’t fit the shape of business. So if you’ve got these domains that you referred to, people don’t neatly fit in these domains. They are likely crossing domains. And I’m wondering how research works along those journeys, and doesn’t fall into silos of the domains, and if the Atlas is a means by which you don’t get stuck, or are able to realize the fullness and richness and messiness and weirdness of your customers’ lives.

Jen: Yeah. That’s exactly what the purpose of the Atlas is. And the Atlas has two altitudes. So there’s jobs, which are really big things that are solution-agnostic, like “assess my financial situation” or, “help me transition to retirement.” Those are things that aren’t about the actions you’re taking in an environment. I’m not opening an account. I’m not, you know, transferring money, right? But those things are important, too. We call those tasks and we have an Atlas of those as well.

And the reason that the Atlas will be useful for us there, is we do find that with those tasks, those are sometimes slivers of an entire journey. And you could have 20 teams all working on a version or a piece of that task. And we’re trying to reconcile that and make sure that where there’s research that might be happening in pockets of the organization that are all focused around that task, that we’re backing up a little bit, making everyone aware of each other.

And saying like, “How can we do a body of research that serves all of you versus 20 discrete research studies?” And so awareness is part of the problem with that. And the Atlas helps us inventory, basically, who’s working on what, and it helps us address that patchy collection of research studies.

So bespoke, discrete research studies are the foundation of your insights, and starting to build structure. So imagine a grid sitting over that, and you’ve got these little patchworks, we’re starting to say there’s places on the grid, there’s longitude and latitude, so that we can start to say, “What do we already know with the bespoke and discrete research studies now, how do we structure this going forward?”

So it informs many squads and many tribes and many domains. It becomes a body of knowledge that is more universally useful versus being commissioned by one team for their purpose, and then never used by anyone else ever again.

Jesse: It sounds like an information architecture job.

Jen: It totally is like, yeah. I agree. You know, thinking about how to structure your insights. We all do it bottoms up, the first thing people do is they go into an org and they’re like, I’m going to build a repository. I’m going to dump all these things in and then I’m going to make it searchable. And I’m going to use AI and that’s going to fix everything. But we’re taking it from the wrong angle. Oftentimes that bottoms up collection of discrete research studies, they don’t click together. They are not cumulative. They don’t create a living dynamic body of knowledge because we haven’t structured it to do that at all.

Jesse: Right. Well, as with any other Enterprise IA challenge, it often becomes a matter of divergent goals leading to divergent viewpoints, and those divergent viewpoints then becoming encoded in the structures by which everybody understands the strategy going forward.

Jen: Yeah, it’s a balance. You have to figure out like, how do I structure this, so it’s somewhat agnostic to who we are and the way we deliver things now. So jobs is a way to think of that.

Jesse: Hmm, it’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it this way before, but I can see through this lens, jobs-to-be-done as a tool for defining the information architecture of a product offering.

Jen: Absolutely, It could be used for that. And the great thing about ODI in particular, not to be overly dogmatic, It’s not the only jobs theory. but I’m fond of it because it does have these two distinctions of core functional jobs. So it’s very high-level jobs and then consumption chain jobs, which we call tasks, but they could be other things. They could be journeys. There could be other types of experiences, but it gives you that leveling, so you can work at both ends of the spectrum.

Jesse: You mentioned your partnerships with the market research folks and the behavioral economics folks as things that were really invigorating for you because they had expertise and methodologies that expanded your world. How would you like to see the work of UX research evolve and expand going forward?

Jen: Hm, that’s a tough question.

I would like UX researchers to gain some of those skills. But one of the things that we’ve talked about, you know, how in design land, we talked about the T-shape and, not necessarily creating generalists, but being able to cover more of the T-shape in knowledge of expanse of things you could know as a designer and a design specialist, and then getting deep in some of those areas, the way we’re talking about that, because we don’t live in Design is, do we have a T-shape for a researcher that spans across user experience research and market research and behavioral economics and loyalty and advertising and marketing? Do we start to create generalists in that vein? So, that’s one thing that I am particularly interested in, is building out skill sets of researchers so that they can learn more of techniques from those other research disciplines.

I think that’s really important, because we’re not always going to be in a situation where there’s low risk and low uncertainty, and we can go talk to five people and then launch a product. And in many cases, if you’re at an existing company, you have lots of revenue at stake, and there’s a history, and many customers whose experiences could be upended by you making changes. And so we really do need to know a lot more about the rigor that goes into traditional research techniques. We can’t test everything in market. Which is also another area that I would love for UX researchers to understand.

And I know at a lot of startups, they do understand A/B testing. But because we can’t test everything in market, how can we build better systems to set norms and predictions and understand correlation? So some of the skillsets I’d love to see are, more quant, more understanding of stats. Yeah, you don’t have to be a statistician, but know what people are talking about and understand when you should call the expert. I think that would be wonderful to see as far as maturity in the field.

Peter: There’s been clearly parallels within design getting reduced to, at least in digital contexts, visual design and interaction design, and screens. And research has also been reduced by companies. There’s so much that it could be, but research has been thought of as interviews and maybe some analysis and we’ll call it a day. And I think what you’re pointing out is that this can be a field or an industry, a practice as varied and rich as design, as software engineering, as any number of other things. But the companies we work with tend to see research in a very limited mode.

You talk about skills building, and you’re the lead of a team. You probably have research leaders within your organization.  And I’m wondering how you approach UX research leadership. And what are those skills that, as you’re looking at building the capabilities of the people on your team, what are skills that you’re paying attention to?

And what are you focused on in terms of growing the leaders within your organization?

Jen: So last year was a big growth year for us because we added that management layer in. Previous to that, UX research was more of a bunch of Lone Rangers out roaming the halls, finding squads to do work for, and we were building out the teams. So, looking for some leaders who had very specific qualities, but also things that might be a little bit more nuanced than just a skillset.

So, what we work on is, first of all, that growth mindset of coming in and saying, “I’m going to learn things here. I don’t know all the answers yet. I’m probably going to be partnered with people that I’m going to learn a great deal from.” And then also having a multiplier mindset. it can be career limiting. She’d be very territorial about what work you should be doing and what work others should not touch because it’s yours.

So we work in a very collaborative way and we encourage the democratization of research program. Ee encourage involvement with that, even if you’re not one of the instructors, you could be a buddy, you could be a coach.

You can help with that program growing because it does have such huge dividends for us. And then, some of the other things are, being really well aware of how product management works. A lot of the books that I give my team to read are product management books, they’re not so much design books, although it’s kind of expected that they would understand the design process, but I do want them to understand what good solid product management looks like, because the product owners, the squad leads, and the tribe leads are the ones that most need them.

So if we can help them see things in a way that’s helpful to get them to move forward with product initiatives and move their projects forward, then those are great friends that we want to have forever. So I want them to be able to speak their language. So that’s something that we focus on.

And, that idea that I mentioned earlier, career mobility. They’re not just research leaders, they’re leaders, and they should be able to have mobility in the organization. So for example, one of my research leaders I brought in last year just went over to the design team. So she’s going to be working on Russ Wilson’s design team now, which is awesome. I love seeing when researchers and designers move across the organizations and also move over to product because there’s nothing better than a product owner who’s been in design or research. They’re excellent partners.

So I wanna make sure that they understand that they have a personal brand. And so we’ve been talking about like, What are you known for? What do you want to be known for? What projects can we attach you to so that you can better illustrate that story? What’s your narrative? So working on that is very important to me because they’re not always gonna work for me. I might be working for them someday. they might move to a different role in Fidelity, but I want them to have a very strong identity, not just that they’re part of my team.

Peter: So at fidelity, you’ve found yourself not only leading this research team, you’re connected to other researchers, people with deep experience, really rigorous experience. One of the challenges that I’ve seen with research is that it can vacillate between one of two poles.

It’s either a little too informal, “Let’s just talk to a few users, call it a day.” Or what I’ve often seen is, people with PhDs in some form of psychology or, you know, ergonomics or whatever, who are like, “The only research that is acceptable is ones that are run by people with PhDs who understand all the highly detailed realities of doing research quote the right way, unquote.”

And I’m wondering how you navigate that, where there’s this desire to get your product teams and others to be doing research, but there’s also professionals who know how to do it, quote unquote the right way, and what are the judgment calls there around the practice of research, and how to make sure the PhDs don’t get their knickers in a twist that someone’s talking to five people in some informal way, but how also not to get bogged down by rigorous research all the time.

Jen: So we have something called learning agenda that we create with product owners, squad leads, tribe leads, that are trying to learn all the things. We come together as a team. UXR and market research and behavioral economics, if they’re involved, if they think they can help.

And we create an integrated learning agenda, what do we want to learn? And then we talk about how could we learn those things with what techniques and who’s going to take what? And so you’ll actually see, we have these nice little plans of like phase one, phase two, phase three, they’re all still sitting in Right Problem. But it’s like, who’s taking what? And then how are we orchestrating the readouts so that we’re either doing them together or they’re in an order of operations that tells the story appropriately?

And that’s where we get into the quant qual quant qual type of pattern or cadence. So we do that together with them. if you’re in a very quantitatively driven organization where there’s massive fear around risk and uncertainty, you need to partner with the quants.

You’re not going to win a battle of my five users versus your 3000 balanced-sample study, backed by third-party research company. You want to actually take those things and say, “Which questions are each of these best at answering?” And what we find is that a lot of those really intense survey work surfaces, a lot more questions that we can get at very deeply with one-on-ones or IDI is as they would call them in market research so that we can do this nice dance of back and forth and use the techniques for what they were built for. Use the right tool, to get the effect that you’re looking for. So it’s definitely a partnership. I don’t think it’s one or the other.

We can find a way through this together for sure.

Jesse: Beautiful.

Peter: Yeah, I’m imagining you as Dorothy and everyone else is one of the animals skipping down the yellow brick road, linking arms.

Jen: Thank you both so much. This is really fun.

Jesse: Jen, thank you so much.

And that wraps up another episode of finding our way. You can find Jen Cardello on the internet. She’s Jen Cardello on LinkedIn. She’s at @jencardello on Twitter. You can find this podcast on the internet as well. You can find past episodes and transcripts on our [email protected]. There’s also a feedback form there.

We love to get your feedback either through our website on LinkedIn or on Twitter. I’m @jjg. He’s @peterme. We’ll see you next time.

Denise: Feeling so full of what I was capable of, and so in love with what I was capable of that I thought, well, what else can I do? If I can accomplish this major thing, what other major things can I accomplish and can I give to the world of myself? And when I had that experience, I was like, that’s what I want to help people with.

I want to help people feel like this.

Peter:  I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Together: And we’re Finding our Way…

Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.

 Jesse: On today’s show, author and consultant, Denise Jacobs joins us to talk about maintaining a creative culture, how leaders can keep the creative spark alive in their own work, fighting imposter syndrome, banishing the inner critic, and a lot more.

Peter: I have a question for you, Jesse.

Jesse: Yes?

Peter: Why did you invite Denise on our podcast?

Denise: He said, “I have questions.”

Jesse: I do have questions. I have questions for Denise. So, Denise Jacobs… actually, you’re going to do a better job of introducing yourself than I am. Denise Jacobs, who are you and what…

Denise: Oh, you think so?

Jesse: Do you do? I do.

Why don’t you describe the areas that you work in.

Denise: So my springboard area of expertise is creativity because I’ve been doing a lot of work on creativity since 2011 and, doing keynotes and workshops and whatnot on it, but then came out with my book, Banish Your Inner Critic in 2017, which was all around creativity.

But the interesting thing is how some piece of work starts to put you into a new direction. And so now I’m focusing a lot, not just on creativity specifically, but more around how people can do better work through silencing that voice of self-doubt, so what you are able to accomplish and what you’re able to do, whether you’re at what I call the producer level, if you’re a UX designer or a developer, but then when you get kind of more to the managerial level, or even to the leadership level, how can you do what you do better through acknowledging that inner critic and having tools to be able to combat it so that you can actually show up more powerfully.

Jesse: One thing that I love about the book, that you touched on a bit here, is that it does go broader than simply issues of creativity.

Denise: Absolutely.

Jesse: Although it definitely is through the lens of being a creative professional and has a lot to say about the specific tactics for creative professionals, the principles there are really, in a lot of ways, about self-actualization.

Denise: That’s totally it. Definitely, I feel like the true goal of my work, and actually the reason I even started working around creativity in the first place, was to get to that place of self-actualization, because I had had this experience where I had this amazing creative flow state, and I felt so empowered and I felt so like, full of myself, in the respect of being full, like not needing anything else, you know, not needing the external validation, not needing somebody else to tell me it was okay, feeling so full of what I was capable of, and so in love with what I was capable of that I thought, “Well, what else can I do? If I can accomplish this major thing. What other major things can I accomplish? And can I give to the world of myself.”

And when I had that experience, I was like, that’s what I want to help people with. I want to help people feel like this. And at the time, because what I needed was to reconcile myself and to come to terms and embrace and acknowledge and recognize my own creativity, the answer for me was creativity. But now that I’m along this path of a breadcrumb trail that led me to inner critic work it’s just like, “Oh, this applies to so much more than creativity.” And it affects people so profoundly, it’s such a universal affliction.

Jesse: So our audience is design leaders, and a lot of these folks find themselves awarded responsibility in their organizations, because they were really good at the creative part of their job, they found a way to create for themselves that creative flow and that energization that you’re talking about.

And then people looked at them said, “Wow, you’re doing so great at this. We should give you more responsibility so that you are now doing less of that. And you’re doing these other things instead.”

Denise: ”You’re doing so great at this, that we’re going to make you do something completely different, that you have no idea how to do. And of course you’ll naturally be great at that because….” What?

Jesse: People who were previously very confident in their jobs, find themselves in these new roles, and find that confidence has been taken out from underneath them because they’ve been cut off from the creative practices that connected them to that sense of power that you’re talking about.

Denise: Absolutely.

Jesse: So I wonder what thoughts you have on the challenges of keeping creativity alive in your work, when your work is no longer strictly creative work per se.

Denise: Okay. So I actually have two things that I want to say. I’ll answer that question in a moment, but before I go into that, what I want to say is, that whole process that you just described is one of the key times that the inner critic becomes so loud for people, it becomes so prominent, and it’s become so in their face and forward. And that is exactly the work that I am focusing on now is helping people with their career confidence. Because it is in that transition that all of these mechanisms go into play that trigger the inner critic. Having said that, the interesting thing is that the same tools and the same practices that you use to silence your inner critic, to unblock creativity, are the same constellation of tools that you can use to counter that feeling. And in doing so get back to your creativity.

Jesse: So, I’m an independent leadership coach now and one thing that I say to people is that leadership is a design problem.

Denise: Preach it.

Jesse: And, you’re working with different materials and often the materials that you’re working with are your relationships with other people. And it’s in relationships with other people often that this inner critic stuff gets kicked up for people.

Denise: I actually just finished reading a great book that’s going to be coming out by a friend of mine his name is Mark Pitman. And his book is called The Surprising Gift of Doubt. And it is how uncertainty can help you become an exceptional leader.

And one of the things that he talks about is the other problem with moving from a role where you were doing something really well, and it was creative and everything, to being a leader, is that you think that there’s a certain way to be a leader. And there’s not a lot of support, I think, about giving people the space to discover how they lead, and have the exploration and the journey that people have to go on to be able to discover all those things about what works for them.

Like, if you’re not extroverted, then being a loud, extroverted leader is not going to work for you. And then you’re going to feel even more out of sorts, you’re going to have even more of an inner critic dogging you, et cetera. And so, it is this design problem. And then it’s also this journey of discovery, which a design problem basically is. Solving a design problem is a journey of discovery.

But very few people contextualize it that way.

Peter: Creativity is one of those funny words.

Denise: It is a funny word.

Peter: Just to make sure that we have a common understanding of what you mean by creativity: How do you define it? How should we be thinking of creativity?

Denise: My main working definition of creativity is bringing something new into being.

Peter: I think so often creativity is associated with things like the arts or writing and those types of practices, which are clearly creative practices. What is the connection you make, if any, between those expressive forms of creativity and the kind of creativity you’re encouraging through career confidence, through designing your own future?

Denise: Because my background, as a front-end developer and somebody who used to teach HTML and CSS and work with software engineers, I’m always very careful to, very point blank, say that art and creativity are not the same thing. Making art is not the same as being creative. You can be creative in anything. You can be creative as a social organizer. You can be creative as a scientist. You could be creative as a CEO.

Creativity basically is problem solving, whatever this problem is, however it needs to be solved. If you come up with a solution to a problem, you’re exercising creativity.

So, when people are trying to cultivate their confidence, trying to step into a new position, expanding themselves, getting to self-actualization, all the things that we’ve been talking about previously, they are using creativity because, first of all, they are bringing something new into being, and second of all, they are problem-solving.

You’ve got an issue. “I’m where I am now. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be in a different place. What do I need to do?” And then you go along the process of figuring out what you need to do and taking the steps for it. I truly believe that that is exercising creativity as well.

Peter: Thinking about working with design leaders, I don’t have a formal coaching practice, but I work with design teams and design leaders as well.

If I want to be encouraging creativity appropriately, for both them as individuals and maybe a team, what does that look like? How do we know that they are hitting enough creative cylinders? How do I look at something and go, That is appropriately creative!

Denise: That is actually an outstanding question. And I will give you an answer that probably is not substantive for you. It’s not based on metrics or anything like that, because, I feel like first of all, when you start to get into, How creative is it on the spectrum? Is it zero? Does it go to 11? Then you start getting into this judgment about creativity, and then that will set up a whole other thing that’ll trigger your inner critic. “I’m not creative enough.”

As a matter of fact, one of ways that I got to some of these forms of the inner critic that I talk about in the book, are from this exercise that I’ve done at conferences, workshops, where one of the things that people said very frequently is, “I’m not creative enough.”

What does that even mean?

If you’re creative at all, like you’re winning, right? If you’re doing anything you’re winning. So I feel like then trying to quantify it like that is dangerous and that it needs to be more of a qualitative analysis where it is, How do you feel when you’re in this process? Does it feel good or does it not feel good?

I would say that, because it feels good, then that means that you’re being quote, more creative. And I think when you’re working with teams at the end of the day, what they create is important.

But the experience of working together and everything, is going to have more longevity and more importance to the functioning of the team than the actual thing that they produced. And the dynamic within the team will also affect the quality of what they produce. So if they’re having a good experience, if they’re connecting with each other, that will be something that they can all feel and experience. And when that’s not there, they will also be able to recognize its absence.

Peter:  Calling me out on my desire to reduce or, quantize things that aren’t quantized… There’s a history of that Jesse’s and my conversations. I’ve done the same with the concept of trust, trust is one of those things that the moment you try to start defining it, you kind of lose the plot, right there.

And I think that’s what you’re saying about creativity. If you try to put it in a box that you can look at and study it, then you’ve kind of lost the point of that energy, that flow, that forces that the creativity is providing.

Jesse: It’s almost by definition, if you can capture it in a box, it’s not the thing you’re looking for.

Denise: Right. And it’s also like, how do you know if you’re really in love? Because it feels good.

Peter: No, no, no, no. You write long lists of pros and cons. Isn’t that it? And then you…

Denise: You rate it on a scale of one to ten…

Jesse: You weigh them all and you build your spreadsheet.

Denise: Exactly. Does it feel good? If it feels good, then you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t, you know, you gotta leave.

Peter: Okay. I know Jesse’s probably itching, but I got to follow this one up. Because one of the challenges that design leaders, design teams face within organizations is working often with peers–engineers, product managers, marketing folks–who are highly quantified. They want everything to be metric-ized, and they want everything to be A/B tested or somehow proven.

And I’m wondering how you’ve been successful in bringing this force and energy into organizations that might not have been ready for it. Because their mindset had been so analytical, mechanistic. What have you done to make that kind of change?

Denise: The interesting thing is, if I’m in an organization, it’s because they want something different than that, what they’re looking for is that ineffable quality or thing that they can’t put their finger on, or quantify or anything.

They’re looking for the energy and the spark of creativity and flow and connection that they weren’t able to achieve through the more analytical means.

Jesse: A lot of this comes back to creating and maintaining a culture of creativity for the design organization, and then being able to hold that boundary, and shelter that creative culture from whatever the larger culture is that people find themselves in.

Denise: Yeah. Or to even, try to get the leaders on board so that they are instrumental allies and even champions of this culture.

Jesse: Right.

I think one of the challenges in creating that culture of creativity is having a culture of constructive critique rather than criticism.

It’s something that a lot of design leaders find a hard time striking the right balance, creating enough support for creative exploration on their teams, so people can try new ideas and play around at the edges, while also being able to provide constructive feedback to teams that channels that work in a way that brings it to fruition.

And in a lot of cases, I feel like our inner critics take their cues from the outer critics, the people around us and the culture of critique versus criticism in how creative work is handled.

What are the tactics, for encouraging that balance?

Denise: Yeah, I think our inner critics really are responding to outer critics, and our inner critics literally developed because of outer critics. Our inner critics developed as a psychological construct that came as a protective mechanism to help us deal with and potentially even try to subvert having any outside criticism come in. You know, you get those early on and you’re like, well, I don’t even know what I did, but I’m going to be super hypervigilant now to try to prevent something like that crap ever happening again.

Very, very few people have ever been critiqued properly. Have never been given feedback in a way that is actually supportive or good or positive. And then we learn that, and then we think that’s how you do it.

I actually had a manager at Microsoft, where… I go into my one-on-ones with my manager and he was like, “You were in that meeting, that should have like triggered your localization ear.”

And I was like, “I literally don’t know what I’m supposed to be listening for. Can you tell me what it is I need to listen for?” And he was like, “You know, Microsoft is a sink or swim environment. So either you’re gonna sink or you’re gonna swim.” I was like, “Not helpful, manager.”

When you go in to get feedback, structure the feedback as much as you can, so that you get what you need, and through doing that, you essentially train the person who’s giving you feedback, how to give you feedback.

Like you’re gathering information for a friend and then you’re trying to find specific information as much as you can. Asking for this information in a certain way, this is not about their character or whether they’re good enough. I’m trying to give them information so that they can do their job better.

Jesse: I really like this idea. I think it’s interesting from a couple of angles. One is that in critique situations, the person whose work is being critiqued, often adopts this very passive powerless stance in the meeting. And what you’re advocating is really for them to act like it’s your meeting, not their meeting, and take control of the process.

And I think broadly for design leaders, as they are often engaging in processes that they have limited influence over, wherever you can find ways to take back control of your processes from people who don’t understand your needs, those are places where you can expand your leadership, and those are leverage points where you can get farther.

Peter: Something I think I’m realizing as you talk about silencing that inner critic, if you can separate your sense of self-worth and your identity from the work you’re producing, you will, frankly, no longer feel the criticism because it’s not about you.

So much of the challenge with this fear of criticism is it feels like it’s about you as a person, an entity, your identity, your worth in the world. And helping people create a bit of healthy distance between them and what they produce, and make it about that thing that you’re producing, and anyone can criticize that all they want—is that thing achieving the goal, is that thing, based on whatever rubric, working—but it’s not about, “Am I a better or worse person because I made that thing,” and one of the challenges I’ve had throughout my career is people get so caught up in their identity with respect to their work. It becomes a reflection of themselves.

Denise: That’s been one of my own personal struggles, when I create something it’s like, “This is my baby. This is a piece of me,” and getting to the place where there is the ability to practice some of that distance.

Jesse: I want to talk a little bit about the inner critic because it can be a bit of a slippery concept and it certainly can look very different for different people.

Tell us a little bit about some of the different forms that this shapeshifter, the inner critic, might take, that people ought to be watching out for.

Denise: I feel like the inner critic does show up in a lot of different ways. And a lot of times people will talk about imposter syndrome as its own thing. I personally believe that imposter syndrome is a form of the inner critic. Perfectionism is a form of the inner critic. Being highly self-critical is a form of the inner critic.

Being afraid of being judged, comparing yourself to other people. Fear of failure and success can be a form of the inner critic, and procrastination/self-sabotage can also be a form of the inner critic.

And those fears that we have, those fears of not being enough, or those fears of being found out, are these kind of deep fears of who we are afraid that we are, they kind of get in the way. And they keep us from being who we can be.

Jesse: For leaders, I think there is this additional challenge of supporting their people in contending with their own inner critics. And what are some of the things that a design leader might want to watch out for among the folks on their team that indicate that somebody might be struggling with this and it might require the leader to step in and provide some support.

Denise: A lot of times, I feel like in creative, collaborative environments, what happens is people tone themselves down. People silence themselves. There was a great article on 99U by Matt May, that refers to “ideacide.” And I love that term, the concept that you’re killing your ideas before they have the opportunity to come out and really see the light of day, and sprout and blossom. And maybe they are kind of non-starters, but you never know until you actually give them an opportunity to come out.

And so often people will be in meetings… Talk to them one-on-one and they’re just like, “Well, I was thinking this,” and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s a great idea.” And then there’s the meeting where the perfect opportunity for the person to share that idea, and they don’t say anything and you’re practically kicking them underneath the table.

Like, “Say the thing that we’ve talked about…!” “No, no, I don’t think, no.” And I feel like that happens so often with a lot of people that it’s become second nature. And what I think would be helpful for managers and people leaders is to recognize where that’s happening.

And the other thing too, especially in light of Black Lives Matters movement and a lot of what’s going on, people of color, women, anybody in a disenfranchised group, is going to have a stronger inner critic because society literally makes them have a stronger inner critic. And so then that self-doubt is going to be even stronger. And so, if you’ve got women on your team, if you’ve got women of color on your team, if you’ve got people in the LGBTQ community, they may not have that strong sense of self. They’re not going to share their ideas.

And, it’s also very common for white men, or men, to talk over these people, to discount their ideas to start. So this is kind of a hot mess. I think that’s the technical term.

Jesse: Well, definitely in my own coaching work, I’ve worked with number of women, and the challenges that they face, in particular of feeling like they have to adopt masculine communication styles in order to be heard, it really ends up driving them into this deep place of self-doubt about their own instincts. They stop trusting themselves.

 I want to get your take on introverts though, because this is a topic that’s come up previously on the show. And my hunch is that many, maybe most, people who self-identify as introverts are actually hostages of their inner critics, who have developed a robust case of Stockholm Syndrome and have fully internalized that sense of being trapped into their own identity.

Denise: Hmm. So, I found this tweet not too long ago that was pretty profound and insightful. And it was more about imposter syndrome, but I can see this having a direct correlation with introversion as well.

And it said, “I wonder if what’s called imposter syndrome is just a way to rationalize how women and people of color have been treated all of this time.”

Oh my God. Like, just amazing, right? And I feel like that could totally be true, too, of introverts. That there is this thing that, you’ve been talked over so much.

So here’s one that says, “Maybe you don’t have imposter syndrome. Maybe you’ve been treated like an imposter your entire career.” And then here’s the one that I was looking for. “Sometimes I wonder if imposter syndrome, originating from the 1978 concept imposter phenomenon, is just another example of making racism and sexism and professional spaces appear as a psychological myth rather than a structural reality of how people get poorly treated.”

Jesse: That’s great.

Denise: It’s amazing, right?

Jesse: Whose words are those?

Denise: Tamara K. Nopper.

Jesse: Alright, thank you, Tamara.

Denise: Again, it’s like you said, this internalization of, “I think differently, I like to think before I talk, not think as I’m talking, and I actually want to find out what’s going on before I weigh in on something.” And then it’s like, “Oh, that makes me an introvert.”

Yeah, or you just haven’t had the setup and the structure for you to be able to be.

Introversion is definitely a spectrum. I like to say that I’m like 60, 40, or 40, 60, depending on the day. I would say that I’m an ambivert. But, you know, when I’m really tired and everything, everybody out of the pool. And I just want like a cup of tea and a book and like a cat on my lap, like out, I don’t want to talk to anybody.

I’ll turn the phone off. I’m like, “That’s it, it’s over, cancel Christmas.” So, what ends up happening is that if people were in an environments where they felt more comfortable, and they were given the space, that they would probably be super-talkative. They would probably be more like a typical extrovert, but they’re not given the space for it.

And extroverts take up a lot of space.

Peter: I’m reading the book Caste, that just came out, by Isabel Wilkerson. She hasn’t really addressed work contexts. It’s much more societal.

However enlightened and sensitive we’re trying to be even within our offices, and as we’re embracing matters of diversity and inclusion as companies, and as individuals, I mean, Jesse and I, as white men, have talked about this on this show, how we’re trying to practice being better, more supportive, in these regards.

In her book, she has this story of going to a conference in India, I believe, about caste, which is essentially a critical discussion. These are folks who are trying to do away with or understand it so as to repair their society. And afterwards, she approaches someone and asks them, “Are you in what would be considered the dominant caste?” and the woman that she says this to is aghast, because she’d been trying to be as woke and as sensitive to her standing as she could. And Isabel’s like, “Yeah, I could tell by the way you interacted with other people and they interacted with you that you were in a dominant caste and those other people were in a subordinate caste,” even though everyone was trying to be explicitly not caste based in this structure.

And it just shows how deep it goes. And one can only imagine this is true in the workplaces we are part of, however, again, sensitive and D&I-oriented we’re trying to be.

What approaches or strategies or tactics can be taken to allow as many voices in a room to be heard and, to be able to contribute?

Denise: Another great quote that I saw, which I spoke about it in a conference that I spoke at, the Enterprise Experience conference, and it said something to the degree of, “Racism won’t end until white people stop looking at as an issue that they need to be sympathetic towards, and look at it as something that they need to solve.” And I was like, yes, exactly. White supremacy won’t die until white people see it as a white issue they need to solve rather than a black issue they need to empathize with.

And I think that’s really true. Castes, racism, sexism, everything, it can’t be solved by the people who are the recipients of it. Or who were on the low end of it. It has to be solved by the people who put it in place.

And I think the more people see these issues as, “Oh, this is something I have to do something about,” rather than, “Oh, I feel so bad.” You know, like, “Oh, I feel so bad about that. It’s so wrong that you have to experience that.” It’s like, “Yeah, it’s really wrong that you benefit from it all the time. That’s really sad too.” And that it becomes more like everybody working together to try to address this issue, rather than “good luck with that,” right? All of the awareness and everything has been so long overdue, but as a black woman,  has also been exhausting because it’s just dredged up so much.

But, you know, at least, now if I say something, it’s not going to be people being like, “That’s not an issue. That’s not a problem. I don’t— Why are you so upset? Why are you so upset? Why are you so angry?” I’m, like, “I’m angry because this is some bullshit. That’s why I’m angry.”

I’m angry because this is ridiculous and it should have gone away. It should have been, you know, I grew up in the seventies, like we were under a false sense of security that it was just going to keep getting better and better and better. And then like just crazy things just keep popping off.

We really need to do this collectively. Like you think you benefit from this, but you don’t. All the things that have been an outcome of racism and white supremacy, okay, so great, you are able to buy a house more easily and all this stuff, but then you end up going and being in suburbs that are completely, homogenized and then you don’t get the culture. You think you’re safe, but you don’t feel safe when you go into other neighborhoods.

But what if you could just be safe everywhere? What if you could just have everybody everywhere all the time didn’t have to be afraid? Like, I kinda think everybody would benefit from that. Other people don’t feel the same way, but, I’m biased.

Jesse: I think we all are. Yeah.

Denise, thank you so much for being with us. It’s been a wonderful conversation.

Do you have anything to plug? Where can people find you on the internet?

Denise: Yes, the interwebs. So you can find me at denisejacobs.com is my website. On Twitter and Instagram I’m @denisejacobs. On Facebook, you can follow me at denisejacobsdotcom all written out. On LinkedIn, I’m Denise R. Jacobs.

And actually, I am going to be launching an online course on career confidence. It’s called Amplify You: Cultivating Career Competence. And so you can go to http://amplify-u.com and check that out. And then finally, I have several courses on LinkedIn Learning, and so you can go and look for me as an instructor on LinkedIn Learning and go and check out my Banish Your Inner Critic to Unleash Creativity course, the Creative Collaboration course, the Creativity for All: Hacking Creative Brain course. And then coming out, I think in December, is going to be the Business Case for Creativity to help leaders champion their cause for creating a creative culture in their organizations.

Peter: Hmm. And there’s the book.

Denise: Oh, right. And then there’s my book, Banish Your Inner Critic, which you can buy on amazon.com. I mean, you can also probably roll into most Barnes and Nobles and find it right when you enter the store in the bargain book section. I know, but still it’s in hardback and it’s wonderful. So you can get at a Barnes and Noble. If it’s not there, you can just ask for them to order it or you can order it on Amazon.

Jesse: Wonderful. Thank you, Denise. This has been great.

Jesse: And with that, this has been episode 21 of Finding Our Way. You can find the previous 20 episodes as well as this one, as well as probably some future episodes, too, that I don’t even know about on our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you’ll find audio and transcripts for every episode. Plus, there’s a way to send us feedback on our website.

Please send us feedback. We love your feedback. You can use our website or you can just write to us on Twitter. I’m @jjg he’s @peterme, or you can find us on LinkedIn under our real names as well. We’ll see you next time.

Erika: Most of what operates under the label of “design” right now is styling business models. It’s not actually design because you’re not making meaningful choices. The choices have been made. They’re outside your purview and designers are chasing after it, coloring in the boxes.

Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Together: And we’re Finding Our Way…

Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, veteran design consultant Erika Hall of Mule Design Studio, author of the books Conversational Design, and Just Enough Research joins us to talk about whether designers are truly ready for that coveted seat at the table, how to build those crucial cross-functional relationships, and the relationship between design and capitalism.

Jesse: So let’s jump in.

Peter: You have recently said something that I want to hear more from you and hear Jesse’s take on what you’re saying. I believe the phrase is, “The business model is the new grid.”  What does that mean?

Jesse: Well, that sounds great because I have no idea what that means.

Erika: Oh, fantastic. So what that means is, the important design now is interactive digital design, however you want to construe that. And we’re still drawing from the graphic design models. We still think of like, What’s the platonic ideal of this? It’s like graphic design, but now it’s in a web page or on a screen or something.

And, I think the whole field of design is working from this horseless carriage way of thinking about it. Yeah. Because the grid is not what constrains your work. It’s the underlying exchange of value. And I think when designers don’t realize this, they do all this talking about being human-centered and empathy, myah-myah-myah-myah-myah, and then they’re shocked, they’re shocked when their work is being used to exploit people or extract value or do some rent-seeking bullshit, like all these delivery companies that are vampires on local restaurants, and designers don’t have any tools to confront this situation because they are borrowing the practices of the kind of work that’s irrelevant.

And so if you think about fundamentally, What does your design snap to? It snaps to the business model.

And there’s no overcoming that. There’s no amount of empathizing with customers that will change that because ultimately your work will be deformed to, perverted to, constrained to that underlying exchange.

Peter: All right. You know, we talk about design operating within constraints. The business model is the singular constraint through which everything gets molded, regardless of…

Erika: Yeah. And the business model can be designed. And I think this is the most important work for designers, ‘cause designing business models is within the skill set of any good, like, designer. To really understand what everybody needs, how to reconcile and balance those needs, and how to create a system that creates a flow of value among all the different parties.

It is not intellectually difficult, like getting an MBA is not an exercise in stretching your intellect. So, I think the mechanics of business a designer can understand, but when they think about business, they think, “Oh, I’ve got to prove the ROI of my work. I have to think about KPIs.” And they think about like, “How do I fit my sketches into something where the people in the C-suite will care about me?”

As opposed to, “Wait a second. The people in the C-suite are fucking everything up. Chasing this weird exploiting growth engine, but I, as a designer could redesign the system and come up with something where you create a product, a service, an entity, whatever that actually adds value to the system and doesn’t extract it.”

And people are happy to pay for things. Like, people pay for stuff all the time. People pay for things that are valuable, but price is a signal has been completely obliterated by the availability of capital to subsidize services and products and make them free. Like nobody knows what, say, an Uber ride costs, what a taxi ride should cost, because the pricing signal has been completely camouflaged by subsidies from investors. So that’s what I mean by the business model being the grid.

Jesse: I’m hearing a couple of things in that statement. One is that designers need to understand business factors, the business variables, the business constraints that influence the success of their design work. And then secondarily, there’s an opportunity to do that design work or to do some system level work that resembles design at the level of the business model separate from what anybody might have considered to be their job as a designer in the past.

Erika: Yes. And I think most of what operates under the label of “design” right now is styling business models. It’s not actually design because you’re not making meaningful choices. The choices have been made. They’re outside your purview and designers are chasing after it coloring in the boxes.

Peter: I wholeheartedly agree. The challenge that I perceive, working with designers and design leaders, is how they get into that earlier framing conversation. Often design is not seen as a contributor to strategy or business direction.  Even when you have very smart, strategic people in design, they’re often painting within boxes that someone else has established.

They might be doing so very intelligently and very systemically, but there’s still some barrier between wherever design lives and wherever those conversations are happening. What have you seen in terms of how design can, I don’t know, storm those gates get beyond the castle wall and influence that? What is the move to start having the conversations that you’re encouraging them to have?

Erika: Well, it’s not easy to do that. I’m not saying like all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, I just realized. Hey CEO. I just realized that if we don’t fix the business model, everything else is jacked and my work is pointless.” That’s not going to happen. So I think it is going to be very similar to, you might recall, the early days of UX, and how there were some prominent UX consultancies that shifted the conversation.

I think the same thing has to happen because it doesn’t make sense to have a strategic design agency in the same way anymore in terms of making artifacts, because that work has all been pulled in house. And that’s the other part of the conversation people haven’t been having, which is, pulling design in house fundamentally changes design.

It changes the practice. You can assess your influence as a designer by thinking about what the limits of your freedom to ask questions are. Like, if you can walk in and say, “Why are we doing this as a business?” you have a lot of influence.

If you’re not allowed to raise questions, then your design work is relatively more shallow. Jesse named two things. So the third thing that’s going on is that design being pulled in house has changed design because they’re no longer questioning from the outside.

So to answer your question, Peter, what has to happen is the new design consultancies are actually more like management consultancies, but without the baggage of a McKinsey and without the willingness to solve any problem. So I think it’s probably similar to the work you’re doing now, where some designers who are very, say, seasoned, do lead by modeling a new kind of consulting and defining a new practice area because people inside cannot set the terms of the conversation, but people outside can push on that and articulate this and do some consciousness-raising. So I think just like UX started as something from the outside that pushed business, this again is going to be a new kind of consulting agency, and a new kind of thinking and talking and discourse that’s going to push on organizations and push on people within those organizations, because you can’t change it from the inside.

And it’s particularly challenging because a lot of people are very successful doing that thing. So where’s the incentive for them to change?

Peter: So are you stating, categorically, that a VP of design within some enterprise cannot make the kind of business model change that you’re articulating. and that instead that VP might be able to help bring in some type of external consultant, recognizing a problem is occurring and say, “Hey, why don’t we approach it from this way? Here’s a group that can help us,” but that VP themselves, you’re in the system, you just can’t unmake it.

Erika: Yeah, that’s the case. There might be exceptions. The only exception I could see is if the organization were in crisis. We’ve seen this in our own work when we’ve been brought in from the outside and then something failing about the business provides an opportunity for them to change.

But if the business is functioning, according to the metrics it set for itself, you can’t change that, because what a lot of organizations are doing is shareholder-centered design. And if the shareholders are happy, that’s the only metric that matters in a business, ultimately. And I think these are maybe be like hard truths, and I’m not saying you can’t do anything good or valuable.

But I’m saying that you’re work as a designer is bounded and constrained by this. And you cannot transcend that. If you’re working for a good company with a good business model and you’re contributing into that, that’s great. But if you’re not, then I don’t care how much you go out there, and learn about people and empathize with people. That work is ultimately going to be used in support of that business model. And there’s nothing you can do about that from the inside.

Jesse: I think that whether or not people see themselves as being capable of taking on that role has a lot to do with their roots as designers and the values that they internalized about value, about the value of their work, about the value of design. I have my own biases here because I don’t have a formal design education, but I’ve worked with many people who do, and I feel I’ve seen certain patterns in how they think about their work.

I feel like I meet a lot of people who came out of formal design education with the idea that their job was to be the conduit for universal principles of design truth through their work. And their job was to go to school, absorb all these principles so fully that they could apply them in any context that they found themselves in.

And their job was to show up and be the expert on grids and typography and all of those kinds of things. And so they never really thought of themselves as designers of systems or systems thinkers. But then if you do think of yourself in that way, then the question becomes, well, What are the boundaries of your practice? If my job is to be a systems thinker, trying to humanize the systems of the world, what’s off limits for me then? And what is within the bounds of designer outside the bounds of design?

Because a lot of the strategic decisions that you’re talking about making, often, especially in a smaller company, you’ve got to go all the way up to the CEO before you have somebody who has that level of power, and designers have to be invited into those conversations, to Peter’s point, by product people, by business people. And some designers may need to reframe their understanding of themselves and their work in order to make this transition.

Erika: Absolutely. yeah, and I think a lot of design schools need to change. None of us here were educated as quote unquote designers, right?

Peter: Journalism, anthropology, and you’re philosophy…

Erika: Philosophy

Peter: …what, philosophy? So, you just like to ask questions.

Erika: Yes, I do. And teach people how to ask questions because nobody is incentivized to ask annoying questions.

Jesse: I want to ask about asking annoying questions, because Peter touched on the idea that people outside an organization have more latitude to ask questions than those inside because of the constraints of the power structure and power dynamics. To what extent do you feel it is the role of design across all contexts to be questioning the fundamentals of whatever the business context is that they’ve found themselves in?

Erika: I think that is central to the work. I think if you’re a designer, you’re a person who asks questions. I think you can be a craftsperson and not ask questions. You can be a stylist and not ask questions. You can be a maker and not ask questions, but I think if you’re a designer, that word implies a certain amount of power and influence.

And the systems we’re talking about designing now are so complex that it’s very, very rare that the designer is an auteur in the way we used to think about it. Like our idea of a designer. Oh, a Paul Rand or…

Peter: Dieter Rams or something.

Erika: I just think the things we’re designing, ‘cause they are systems, they’re beyond any one person. So I think that being the person who frames the problem, being the person who asks questions, that is core to calling yourself a designer.

Jesse: Problem framing, problem reframing, mean that any internal design leader necessarily takes up this, yeah, permanent antagonist role among the senior leaders of an organization, because they are the one who is there to question what everybody else is putting on the table.

Erika: Yeah, but is a questioner necessarily an antagonist?

Jesse: It’s very difficult not to be received as an antagonist as a questioner, I can say that from experience.

Erika: The practice of design is creation and criticism in dialogue with one another. And I think we’ve emphasized creation and completely lost the sense of criticism, even though that’s fundamental, that’s one half of that dialectic. And I think it’s necessary to do the best work, to create positive change and people have to get comfortable with it and not think of it, like an antagonist.

Peter: We’ve delegated criticism to AB testing or other forms of after-the-fact validation as opposed to the work itself. Because companies are willing to change based on metrics. But, the only criticism that happens internally is crits within a design org, but not say within that broader product development practice.

So you talked about the role of design as being creation and criticism. And I also see the role of design as humanism, we’re bringing a humanistic lens into an environment, primarily dominated by business, whatever that means, metrics-driven thinking, data-driven thinking, or technologically minded thinking. And so, I don’t even know if it’s necessarily questioning so much as it is a new or a different mode of inquiry, different mode of framing. Business is a mode of inquiry, business, MBA-ish-ness is a mode of inquiry. There’s a mindset or perspective there, that have become dominant within these organizations, and I think what you’re arguing for, Erika, is design as an additional mode of framing and inquiry.

I mean, we were making fun before we were recording of the social science stuff that you have on your bookshelf there, but it’s bringing with it potentially this whole social science and humanistic mode of understanding that has been, if not lost within organizations, it’s been relegated to a secondary or tertiary status within organizations with market research or other kinds of after-the-fact reactions to what is being done, but not before-the-fact, informers, of what is to be done.

Erika: My primary issue with the field of design right now is that the discussion is so shallow.  I don’t get the sense that the field is particularly coherent because there is research and inquiry being done and it’s completely disconnected from practice.

And the practice has been completely subsumed into, like, business and engineering. And then people talk about the wish for design to have a so-called place at the table, but they don’t mean that, so often. They don’t mean, “I want design to be engaging at this deep level.” What they mean is, “I want business and engineering to listen to my ideas and tell me I’m smart.”

Jesse: Right.

Erika: Right? Because the sad truth, the bummer about confronting what it means to be a designer in our current context, is that it doesn’t have individual ownership and you can’t show it in a portfolio.

And I think a lot of people get into design because they really love and enjoy graphic design. I love and enjoy graphic design. But the part of the work that’s visible, that’s tangible, that’s a very unimportant part of the work at this point.

I think the actual work of design is invisible and complicated and not appealing to a lot of people who came into the field to work on particular parts of the process.

Music break

Jesse: We had a product management person, Melissa Perri, on the show a couple of weeks ago.

Erika: Oh yeah. I know her. I’ve been at conferences with her.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, we had a great conversation. And one of the things that she said, from her perspective as a product manager who lives in that world all the time, is that, and I’m going to paraphrase, and I hope I don’t mischaracterize what she said, basically she said that most of the designers that she’s worked with can’t be trusted with the kinds of decisions that you’re talking about, because they will torpedo your business in the name of serving humanity, and then don’t give a shit about the consequences.

How accurate do you think that perception is? And if it’s not that accurate, what do designers need to do to change it?

Erika: I want to meet the designer, like, powerful enough to torpedo a business. I the name of humanity.

Jesse: Well, this is the reason given for why designers are not invited to the conversations that you’re talking about, is that they care too much about people. They aren’t going to look out for the needs of the business. They’re going to sink your boat.

Erika: Yeah. I agree with that because, going back to the very start of our conversation, I want designers to understand that the business model is their grid. Yeah. I think designers are ignorant about business. Because it’s never been presented to them as part of their concern. That’s my whole point.

And so, yeah. Designers will come in and because they’ve been led to understand that their work is only on the user side, they don’t understand that a healthy, functional, sustainable business is actually in the benefit to the customer because how often have we found a product or service that was amazing, great, and user-centered, and wasn’t financially sustainable. You know what happened? It goes away and something shitty and profitable comes in its place. And so what I would tell the designers is, if you are truly an advocate for humans, you will care about the business. Because only if user needs and business needs are truly deeply intertwined are you going to be serving humans.

But designers feel like, “Oh, business is dirty” and fight it. And then they end up in service of its worst aims. Because they have the special, precious identity. So I absolutely agree…

Peter: I see.

Erika: …with Melissa on this.

Peter: Yeah. most designers, without a lot of training or coaching and education, you wouldn’t want to just put them in those contexts or give them the authority to make those decisions.

Erika: It’s not even a lot, the concepts are not complicated. The fundamental concepts of business, the business models themselves are not complicated. Business models are not hard. Conceptually. And then once you understand….

Jesse: Just look at all those MBAs who make them all the time, right?

Peter: They’re geniuses!

Erika: Yeah. So this is the book I’m working on. My next book explaining business models to designers.

Peter: Are you sure you want to say this, because now you’re, beholden to it. Okay.

Erika: I’m absolutely committed, because nobody is talking to designers. Inside of business, people are not talking to them at all, or “Oh, just give me the artifacts.”

Or they keep hearing about the business value of design. Harvard Business Review has been writing… I don’t know if something changed in the publication, but in recent years, they’ve been writing some intelligent stuff about the relationship of customer experience and design and things to the business.

So it’s not conceptually hard, but it is a huge reframing and revaluing. So, from the head, very simple. From the heart and from the identity, because I think as you said earlier, Peter, being tied to the artifacts, that is hard to let go of.

The centrality of the artifact is still a part of a lot of designers’ core identity, and asking somebody to let go of the artifacts that they’ve invested their identity in, that is significant. That takes time. That’s not going to happen overnight or happen at all for some people, if your fundamental orientation is, “I make a certain set of choices and my expertise in guiding this set of choices is tied to my identity.” That’s hard.

Peter: Speaking of identity though, I think there’s flip side of that in-house, which is, if designers start reading your book, they develop confidence around understanding business and business models. They start making connections between what they’re aware of and the business. They start figuring out, “Oh, here’s ways that the research that we’re doing could actually drive different ways of thinking about exchange of value.” You know, imagine a moderately complex service system. “We can shift value from one part of it to another and satisfy customers while lowering costs,” and designers start saying this, then you’re going to get a bunch of MBAs saying, “Who the fuck are you? That’s my job.” And those MBAs are going to be like, “Yeah, but did you go to Harvard? Have you worked at McKinsey? Are your spreadsheets going out to the eighth decimal point?”

Jesse: They’regoing to Pat you on the head and say, that’s so cute. Please go back to your desk.

Peter: For the listeners at home, Erika just showed a section of her book that read, “Put an MBA out of work.” But there’s going to be a challenge for the designer, as Jesse was just referring to, even if they are right, even if they are grounded, to develop that credibility so that they are not dismissed, so that they are not marginalized because in applying their background, their understanding, their humanistic design and experience-led understanding to, authentically, honestly, rigorously, intelligently shift the conversation around business, business value, business models, inflows and outflows, they are going to be running up against a different way of considering business, that is more mechanistic. That is less humanistic.

Erika: More quantitative, all of that.

Peter: More quantitative. All of that. I mean, not that the designer’s approach won’t have quantitative in it, but there’s, much bigger, values frameworks at play now.

And, in most companies, those values frameworks are dominated by, uh, mechanistic mode.

Research is an interesting contributor to this, user research, customer research, market research. How does this all get woven together in a way that these newer frameworks, newer foundations, newer perspectives in this conversation are understood and accepted as opposed to just push back and reject it.

Erika: I have an answer for that because so much of my consulting work now is, How do we use evidence to influence decision making? And what you described is just a subcategory of that. ‘Cause I think the big blind spot that a lot of designers and researchers have is taking the tools of ethnography and turning them on the organization, ‘cause the organization is the social context of decision making. So it’s just humans in the same way that you understand humans outside the organization in order to sell products and services to them, or create products and services that fit into their lives and culture and match their mental model.

You take the exact same process and turn it internally. So you go to that MBA. If you genuinely care about your customer, your user and you want to make their life easier, you don’t go to them and say, “Hey, stupid customer. I know better than you stop doing the stupid thing.”

Yeah. That’s not how it works. You’re like, this customer already values this set of things, this set of context is meaningful to them. Let’s position our value prop in terms of what’s already meaningful to them. Exact same process, except building empathy among your coworkers is much harder cause people out in the world, you don’t have to deal with them on Zoom or whatever. I used to say, “You don’t run into them in the office kitchen.” So it’s actually much harder to build empathy among people within an organization, but this is incredibly valuable and completely within the skillset and purview of all designers.

So what you do is you go to that MBA and you say, “Hey, I want to understand your mindset.” This is the questioning, and this is why questioning is not antagonistic because you go to them in a genuine, from your heart, Dale Carnegie, making friends and influencing people, kind of way. And you sit down and you’re like, “I, as a designer, want to make you as the MBA business analyst, whatever, I want to make you feel more successful. And I need to understand your job, ‘cause I feel like I don’t understand your work at all. And I want to understand your work. Tell me about your work. Tell me about your day. Tell me about it, how you see success. Tell me about your concerns and your anxieties.”

And just by inquiring, just by setting aside your own agenda, just by openly asking questions like that, yeah, you are building rapport and you are building a bridge, and now you also know how to frame your work in terms that are meaningful to them.

It’s exactly the process of user-centered design, but internally, and people don’t do this. And if you want your ideas to be listened to, to be taken seriously, you start by inquiry. And so now you can build a partnership and work with them to say, “Hey, I know you’re concerned about business success. I know you’re concerned about quarterly reporting, but whatever. And now, because I understand your world better, I can help bring our world closer in alignment,” or, “Hey, I have a view of customer value that’s meaningful to you.” And if you understand that person, and you’ve really asked questions, you know, to not all of a sudden do this brain dump of like, “Oh, but I know better than you.”

And I’ve talked to designers and researchers who still have this idea about like, “Oh, I know better.” Then the stakeholders, the business leaders, like, we have a special kind of understanding the hardest thing for designers and researchers in this position is letting go of the idea that they’re better than the MBA.

And that is a hard mind shift to be more effective in your own work. As a designer, you have to let go of the idea that you’re better or more special, and then you will be effective and you will have more influence because people inside the organization follow the same rules of relationship building and cognition and emotion-based decision making that people outside the organization do.

Jesse: I think there are a couple of factors to making that transition for designers, that transition in mindset. Part of it is, to your earlier point, letting go of what can feel like the moral high ground as the stewards of humanism and humanity in the organization, the ones who were always there to remind people to do the right thing.

Right.  And then the other part of it is letting go of the idea that your value comes from having all the right answers and embracing the idea that your value comes from having all the right questions.

Erika: Yes. Oh, thank you. Yes. That was like a gift. Exactly.

Music break 2

Jesse: So a lot of the folks who’ve listened to this show are in-house design leaders who manage teams of designers. And what we’ve heard from some of these folks is that they are able to establish these cultural values within their own design teams, but then when their folks go out and engage with their partners in other parts of the business, there’s this real culture conflict that comes up.

It reminds me a little bit of the situation that I frequently found myself in at Adaptive Path where one thing that I insisted on is every designer presents their own work. Which meant that I sometimes was putting very junior designers in front of very senior stakeholders.

And then I had to explain to the stakeholders why they needed to listen to my junior designer. And part of that was just getting them to understand that our junior designers are not like your junior designers in-house. They have a very different mindset and a very different skillset. But part of it, I think, is just opening the door to engaging with a different culture on the part of these stakeholders and the role of the design leader in this I feel is somehow to create that opening, create that space for a peer or business stakeholder or a partner to even consider what your designer has to say.

And I’m curious about your experience, especially as a consultant, where you’re engaging, I mean, you’ve been a design consultant for many, many years now, and engaging with these organizations as an outsider. How does an in-house design leader build that credibility? Not just for themselves, but for their entire team, so that all of their partners across the business take all of their designers more seriously?

Erika: It is harder. It’s a longer process coming from inside than outside because you have the mandate coming in from outside, you know, to come in and say, “Why do you do it like this?” And you won’t get fired.

Inside, it’s the same, it’s one conversation at a time, it’s coming in with a very clear agenda, and this should be easier for designers because designers have the concept in their role of understanding other cultures. So you go to them and you say, we want to understand you better so that our work serves and supports you. And you focus on the rapport building, but you can’t come in with answers, you come in with questions, but the questions that feel that they come from a genuine place of interest and support, and that is so powerful.

I do that simple exercise when I run workshops. And I’ve run a lot of, research workshops with in-house teams. And I just have them interview each other about your boring stupid job for 10 minutes. And it is so powerful. I have seen, like, all teams and organizations change after 20 minutes of, “Oh, we’re going to ask each other what you did at work,” which sounds too… everybody wants a named methodology, a technique, a silver bullet.

It’s talking to people and more importantly, it’s listening to people, which sounds so boring and cheap and like it shouldn’t work, but the most powerful way to influence somebody is to not care about looking smart.

This is every in-house, external, whatever. That’s every designer’s issue. I” have to prove how smart I am.” You have to set that aside and say, “No, I am genuinely going to value and listen to this person in front of me.” There is nothing more powerful than that. And that’s what will make you smarter. That’s what will make you more effective.

Now coming to them and saying, “Oh, I’m going to prove something to you.” I turn down every engagement where somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, I want to work with you on this so that we can prove to the CEO how smart our team is, how accomplished, how much knowledge we have.” I’m like, that’s a losing proposition. You have to listen to them like really deeply and intentionally and, and, completely seriously listen to them and that’s powerful. And then you’ll know that at some point you can come back and demonstrate that you heard them, and it’s not like fake, active listening, surface bullshit.

It’s really caring and really hearing. And if you do that, you can change people’s minds. You can change organizations. I’ve gone in and done it coming in from the outside. It’s possible from the inside. It’s not easy. It’s annoying. It’s not ego-supporting, but it works.

Google did that big two-year Project Aristotle study or whatever. And they found out what makes teams go is psychological safety. You know this from your work at Adaptive Path, you know how much fear there is, how people are just afraid of letting their guard down in front of each other. And that’s what leads to bad work and bad working experiences, and people can’t critique and criticize each other’s work unless they have that trust. Which means, if you don’t really want good things for everybody you work with, then you can’t criticize them, and then shitty stuff is going to get out into the world, because nobody’s going to stop it. ‘Cause you don’t have that kind of relationship within your organization.

Peter: You just talked about, how it’s easier to empathize with your customer than with your colleagues. What strikes me is, not what you’d expect, right? You’re working with these people, you’re collaborating with them. You’re trying to get stuff done with them.

It should be easier to empathize with them, ‘cause you have a firmer understanding of their context. But I also know what you’re saying must be true because it comes up again and again, it’s become almost a cliche to say about designers, that they have way more empathy for their users than their colleagues. And I’m curious if you have a hypothesis or even data, evidence, as to why it’s easier to empathize with the person at the other end of your product or service than someone you’re collaborating with to make that product or service.

Erika: Oh, yes. Oh yes. I have an answer because, often your interests are much more aligned with somebody out in the world because of the way organizations structurally put people in opposition to each other. And part of that is the framing of answers being more valuable than questions, individuals and teams within organizations are often in competition for whose idea wins. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes you have brainstorming meetings.

I think people should never brainstorm ideas. People should only brainstorm and prioritize questions, because when you brainstorm ideas, you’re putting a team in competition with each other for who’s smartest. because of the way the organization incentivizes people or recognizes people or funds people.

The way relationships are set up, so it’s not bananas that you would have a harder time empathizing with people, because a lot of times you’re next to each other, which means your differences are highlighted more, ‘cause the differences are tangible every day.

Whereas the customer, right, the only part of their life that you intersect with is, like you said, the 15 minutes they use your product. The rest of the time the customer could do whatever, they could listen to music you hate, they could, like, like food you don’t like, but in an organization you’re up against each other all the time.

Peter: Yeah, it’s a little bit like that Upton Sinclair quote. It doesn’t pay me to understand you, so I’m not going to learn about you because if I actually understand you, because of how things are structured, I might somehow lessen in the overall context of the organization, cause I might be enabling your success. And somehow our organization has set that up as a bit of a zero sum game. So, your success means my less success because you’re the one now getting the plaudits, the recognition, you get a promotion, et cetera.

if I help you do that, at best I’ve remained flat, but at worst now I am secondary. I am a sub to you. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that makes a lot that’s sense.

Well, we talked a lot about, cultures within corporations, within organizations. And one of the challenges that design leaders face is that, we’re all the product of decades of experiences that have acculturated us, and design leaders tend to have a different set of experiences than product management leaders and engineering leaders and marketing leaders.

And so all these different cultures are expected, now with psychological safety, to collaborate. They don’t recognize just how different perspectives and starting points are of all these folks. And very little has done to try to ameliorate that or mitigate that.

Erika: Yeah, it should be somebody’s paid job to essentially do interaction design on internal communication, but people act like that should just happen, and it won’t.

Peter:  Thank you, Erika, for joining us.

Jesse: Anything you want to plug while we’re here?

 Erika: Yeah. If you want me to come in and help your team make better decisions or yell at any particular subset of people, that’s what I do. I’m a consultant.

Peter: Excellent.

Jesse: Thank you so much, Erika.

Erika: Thank you. This has been fun.

Jesse: You can find Erika’s company Mule Design Studio at http://muledesign.com. You can also find me and Peter on the internet. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on LinkedIn. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. You can find past episodes and transcripts for this podcast on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We’ll see you soon.

Billie: The conditions that are required for a more just world line up as the same conditions that are required for a more successful, more creative, more innovative technology team.

Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Both: And we’re finding our way…

Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.

Peter: On today’s episode of Finding Our Way is my good friend, Billie Mandel. Billie has an illustrious career in design leadership, and team coaching and UX teaching.

Billie: So I got my start in tech in the first dot-com boom. And like many of us, I started as a refugee from academia. I was working on a PhD in political science. I was studying political behavior and comparative politics.

So I started my tech career along with 20 other people who doubled the size of Ask.com on one day. And at the time, the company had proof of concept as a search engine and suddenly corporations realized that they could pay us to make a custom that thing so that their users could ask a question on the internet and maybe not charge the company 50 bucks every time they called up.

So I was hired to be what they were calling at that point, a content editor, and to lead a team of people the way we started. So UXC, but it was not UX.

There were 20 of us who were hired on the same day to start building these things custom for enterprises. And, as things were back in the late nineties, within a year I had a team of 50.

Peter: That you were in charge of.

Jesse: Wow. I mean, talk about being thrown into the deep end of leadership. Had you ever led a team before?

Billie: Had I ever led a team before? Well, the way you lead teams, when you’re  the resident assistant in a college dorm, and you’ve got your finance manager and your kitchen manager. But had I ever been trained as a manager?

No, absolutely not.

Peter: Did they provide any training or were they just like, no… Okay,yYou’re laughing. So, no…

Billie: I mean…

Peter: “You seem capable, here, just have more responsibility.”

Billie: The thing about the first.com boom, there was the work that needed to get done and whatever you were interested in doing and capable of doing, you had the opportunity to do.

Jesse: Was leadership something you raised your hand for?

Billie: Yeah.

Jesse: Why did you want it?

Billie:  I’ve always gravitated towards people management, people, leadership, and maybe some of it has to do with being interested in the social sciences and believing that humans knowing themselves better and knowing each other better and being intentional about how we organize and what the rules are under which organize and what the agreements are we make. I’ve always believed that that creates the opportunity for human creativity and social change. And I found pretty early that the desire to see those connections and create those connections and help other people orient when they’re confused, and to give people guidance in combining their super powers rather than fighting it out, I think that’s something that I developed an aptitude for and an interest in pretty early on.

Jesse: One thing that we hear a lot from design leaders is the challenge of staying close to the creative work as you move into leadership. That the responsibilities of leadership start to take over your time, your attention, your energy, and so forth until those kinds of creative decisions become something that you have to really fully delegate to other people, and you aren’t really having the level of creative influence that you had when you were a designer. But it sounds to me like at least through this phase of your career, you’ve been able to maintain some connection to the creative work, even as you were moving into more and more leadership responsibility.

Billie: I definitely have stayed close to the work and the decisions that feel creative to me.

In my coaching practice, I also hear a lot of leaders saying they’re struggling to stay close to the creative work, and, well, sometimes they mean I miss just sitting down and getting into the zone and figuring out if this is the top layer, what flows come next and what flows coming back, that obsessive fun interaction design zone that is enjoyable for a lot of folks, a lot of people miss that.

I don’t necessarily miss that as much. What I’ve seen as most important in terms of staying close to the creative work is maintaining the ability to care and the ability to ask hard questions and engage without being attached to the outcome. So, I think that’s become one of my favorite things about being here. And an educator role is everybody brings me their creative problems that they’re solving. I get to engage and get my hands dirty and get my brain dirty. Understand what kind of problem are you trying to solve? How far have you gotten, where are your blind spots?

My favorite thing to do is to help fill in people’s blind spots and get a more complete picture of the problem space that they’re working on. To me, that’s one of the most fun things we can do, is use our experience and our designer brain to help add and fill in blanks and create context for other creative professionals.

Peter:  Atlassian was your most recent full time job, if I understand right. You were brought on in kind of a, maybe not unique role, but not yet widespread role  of design education, helping the design team do what they do better.

But you’ve also mentioned teams and team building. And I think that was something you did at Atlassian. It’s funny, you mentioned your PhD or near PhD,  political science, and how do people work together to achieve, accomplish, and  come back around 25 years later, thinking about how people work together to achieve and accomplish.

How do you approach teams and teaming?

Billie: Ah, this is my favorite topic. This is my favorite, favorite, favorite topic. It’s so interesting because the job that I came to Atlassian to do was design education. And when I started getting in deep with the designers and the design teams and their cross-functional collaborators in engineering and in product management, one of the things that became so clear to me is that it wasn’t, How well do they use Sketch? How consistent is their design system? You know, Are they writing good code?

Software teams aren’t limited because they don’t know how to code or they don’t know how to make wireframes. They’re limited because they are not as effective as they could be at combining their ideas and their proposals with each other.  This is my big Aha! In the past three, if not five years. If teams are struggling,

it’s probably because of their teamwork more than it is about their craft skills.

Peter: One of the insights I had at some point in my career was reflecting on my degree in anthropology, which felt, for the longest time, utterly disconnected to my work, and realizing, Oh, Oh, wait a moment. That actually, was a pillar in my foundation of what became my career, later doing user-centered design, human-centered design. I’m wondering what, if anything, from your academic development and understanding, have you brought forth?

Billie: It’s amazing. Now at this point in my career, now that I, have really found my focus and the work that I want to do, the work that’s my work to do in this world feels like helping teams be more effective, helping teams hear all the voices of all the people on the teams and value them all equally and maybe have the most effective or the most valued idea not come from the person with the largest amount of bona fides in the room. And now I get to bring in everything from what I studied academically in political behavior, political sociology.

These ways of understanding human behavior are super helpful in getting us to be a little bit more critical about what do we do at work, and why, I think, right now, one of the things that’s most exciting to me is seeing our industry start to take inclusion seriously for the first time.

And one of the themes that I’m hearing more and more in the coaching work that I do, and in connecting with other folks who are doing more directly work in diversity and inclusion.

One of the things that’s most exciting to me is seeing the conditions that are required for a more just world line up as the same conditions that are required for a more successful, more creative, more innovative technology team. That, to me is what I’m on fire about right now.

What I’ve learned, is you’ve got a whole team of people and you need to hear all of them in order to make it worth everyone’s while. Wow. Amazing. Those are the same conditions that create improved inclusion. I think that gives us a big opportunity in this historical moment to make those connections. So, I’m excited.

Jesse: So to my mind, that kind of stuff often comes back to culture and the tone that leaders set in their organizations for how voices get included and how decisions get made. And I’m curious what you’ve seen, some of the struggles, some of the successes, whether from your own practice,as a leader, or other leaders that you’ve worked with, in creating that sense of inclusion within teams.

Billie: The most important thing that I’ve seen is that, just like our children, our employees and mentees will do what we do, not what we say. And the most common mistake that I see is leaders grandstanding about, “we want you to do this, and these are the values” and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla, from a perspective that’s facing outward and talking down and telling, but those same people, not walking the walk.

Peter:  So, I really want to be the woke leader, but I also know that I’m a middle-aged white dude, and I’m likely going to behave in not so great ways. 

How does a legitimately, authentically desiring leader, who is demonstrating these behaviors unknowingly… Who’s calling them on it? How do we set up a context internally so that they can get some reflection and be called on it?

Billie: Like any other life-sustaining habit, using your superpowers for good requires practice and requires a critical perspective. So, thing one, I’m going to say only leaders who choose to lead with vulnerability actively and regularly will be able to lead to real inclusion. And I absolutely believe that. And I don’t throw down “only”s and “never”s and “always” very often, but I absolutely believe that. I think you must have the ability and the willingness to look critically at your own behavior and to choose to be better.

Probably the most important leadership and professional book that I have is Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck. And I reread it about once a year to see the ways in which my beliefs about my own inherent goodness, superiority, and talent are holding me back and causing me to probably be propping up systems that benefit me unfairly.

So, I think every leader, particularly a leader who is from a majority group, you need a trusted dissenter. And that person needs to be somebody who will tell you when you’re full of shit, who is keeping an eye out for what you’re missing and who has a perspective that’s different from yours. It’s a thing you and I have done in our friendship together over the years, Peter, that I really appreciate.

Peter: I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had those people in my life, professionally, who’ve been willing to call me out on my bullshit, and however defensive I am at the outset, I usually over time realize like, okay, yeah, they’re right, and I learned to take that in, but I think a lot of people don’t have that in their lives or they wouldn’t know how to find it. It’s not something you go to your HR business partner and say, “I need someone to call me out on my bullshit. Can you find me one of them?” Like, so any tips on how to develop that?

Billie: Yes. I have a few ideas. So, I do believe that any leader who wants to create an environment of inclusion and who wants to be able to make use of the team creativity that you get by having that environment, you need to create an environment of regular productive critique, and you need to participate in it yourself.

Jesse: What does that look like? Your participation. Does that mean offering your workup for critique or are you simply serving in the role as sort of arbiter

Billie: Oh, no, it absolutely means that your stuff is on the line. So, to me, one of the most important questions a person on a team can ask their teammates is, “What am I missing?” So this idea that each person on a team has a perspective, and I call this the alchemy of teams. If the three of us are on a team and one plus one plus one, there are three of us. But if we’re all like, well, Jesse’s got that bright red hair. And so he’s going to be the leader because he is, he is forceful.

So we’re all gonna follow him. We all do what he says. One plus one plus one is one. So we do what Jesse says, cause we want to impress him. And we essentially subtract the value that we could have added from the ultimate value the team creates. So the conditions that we want are one plus one plus one is more than three, when the three of us get together and combine our passion and our creative vision. We want the output of what we create together to be bigger and better than what any one of us had brought from the start. The conditions that you need in order to do that as a leader, you absolutely need to be willing to submit your own work and decisions, both to your peers and to your team, to get their perspective, and you absolutely have to do it from a place of honesty.

It can’t just be like, “Hey, what do you think? All right, great. We’re going to do what I wanted in the first place.” As soon as you do that, you’ve demonstrated to your team that you actually don’t give a shit, so the way you would do that as a leader is, you’ve got some kind of critique practice and critique practice is my jam. It’s the thing that I do the most and that I’m working on a book and I will have more tools available for folks to use.

Really, the best thing that you can do is, “Here’s what I’m working on. Here’s what my best thinking has produced. Here’s how far I’ve gotten. This is the part that I’m less than confident about.”

One of the most counterintuitive, but I hear the most high value, parts of my method is, shine a light on the ugly part. When you’re showing your work to people to get their input.

What most of us do is like what our kids do when they bring us a picture. “Do you like it?” Which is great when it’s your kid. But if you bring me something, I mean, Peter, you and I have a good friendship. If you bring me something. And you want to know what I think you don’t care if I like it. You want to hear what you’re missing.

So what I encourage folks to do is to ask, “Here’s my best thinking, shine a light on the ugly part. This is what I’m concerned about, and what I’m afraid is going to happen. Help me make sure my butt’s not hanging out in this way. What am I missing?” And you’ll find, as you ask that of the people on your team, and your peers, you will start to find who are the folks who are really going to tell you what you’re missing in a way that helps you move it forward, but you’re right.

You absolutely have to be willing to hear the answer. To me, most of the core of developing comfort with the answer has been in mindset. I’ve shown someone my work and it’s not landing. Why does that feel so crappy? Most of the answer there is because I was taught to believe that if I’m not brilliant and talented, I’m nothing. So therefore if my work is not brilliant and talented at the get-go, how does that make me a value?

Peter: The curse of the honors student.

Billie: That’s exactly right. That’s why I love Mindset so much because it gives us the best possible framework for why these beliefs have served us.

To be honest. I think one of the greatest illnesses in our industry is that while we all talk about fail fast, fail fast, fail this, fail the other. We collectively have no tolerance for failure. We collectively have very little tolerance for showing our mess.

I would bet you money, go ahead into 10 design critiques across most companies in this industry. You’re not going to see sketches. You’re not going to see wireframes. You’re not going to see user journeys. You’re going to see pretty shiny high-fidelity things that people have gone off and spent a whole bunch of time making look the way they think you want it to look. And that’s a huge problem because all the opportunity for one plus one plus one is more than three comes from showing our mess and shining a light on to the part of the problem that requires the most brain power. So if I could wave my magic wand and give all the designers in our industry something, it would be understanding the value that you get from being vulnerable and being able to do the work that we really need to do in those vulnerable spaces to improve.

But it means that we all have to be willing to improve and willing to start from a place of, It’s okay if our first cut doesn’t have all the answers because we need to figure out what the right questions are.

Peter: You were talking about vulnerability, which I don’t dispute.

Billie: Well, good, ‘cause we’d have to throw down.

Peter: Well, there is a counterfactual.

Billie: Okay. Gimme, I double dog dare you. Try and talk me out of vulnerability.

Peter: Well, well, the counterfactual, I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but the counterfactual is the number of seemingly successful leaders who exhibit sociopathy or narcissism. And I’m wondering, how do I make sense of that. Of this demonstration of an almost lack of interest in others or an actual lack of interest in others, and yet an evident ability to engender success. I’ve worked at companies, I’ve worked at…

Billie: I’m going to interrupt you, my dear. I think the variable there is your definition of success.

Peter: Making lots of money.

Billie: That’s the whole point. I think if it’s making lots of money for you, that’s your goal and you’re a sociopath heck yeah…

Peter: Well. I would say growing a business, I’ve worked for sociopathic slash narcissistic leaders, who’ve been the CEOs of businesses, of some success. There’s clearly, I….

Billie: How are those companies doing on innovation or retention or inclusion?

Peter: I don’t know, but I mean, I’m not one to, apply the DSM out of school, but you can look at wildly successful social media companies and the man-children who run them. And there’s a disconnect between that and what you’re talking about. 2.5 billion users is a measure of success.

Billie: A current measure of success for some people. If you’re talking about longevity, if you’re talking about loyalty…   

Peter: I’m not trying to be a devil’s advocate, ‘cause I actually don’t like devil’s advocacy, but there is a model of leadership that is anti-vulnerable.

It seems that can succeed in certain contexts, and I want to unpack that. I don’t want to believe it.

Billie: One could also say, and for the Jewish lady to say this during the Days of Awe, I’m going to throw down and I’m going to throw down hard. One could say for his business initiatives, Hitler was pretty fucking successful.

The amount of power that was required to take that shit down. It was pretty intense. The level of execution that was possible with a machine like that. I know bad, bad metaphor. When you were talking before, it had me thinking about Hannah Arendt and the origins of totalitarianism.

There’s a thing about the division of labor in a totalitarian system that looks a lot like the division of labor in a company that has a sociopathic narcissistic leader. I think if you look at the Banality of Evil, you read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and looking systemically at what makes large-scale atrocity possible. There’s a level of a division of labor and specialization that can be incredibly effective at a large scale level.

Peter: Hmm. You basically compartmentalize the organization like you would compartmentalize emotions, Like in order to deal with this thing.

Billie: That’s absolutely right. So there’s no one person that is making the decision to press the red button. Each person is responsible for a little bit of the decision that collectively adds up to atrocity. And frankly, I do think that what we see in a lot of massive multinational corporations smells a little bit too much like that for my own comfort.

And I do see it showing up in our tech companies. You know, we’re talking about  massive scale of global atrocity, but even if you bring it back down to something more tangible on the daily, I think there’s a commodification of individual skill and then leaving big decisions up to the big brains, that can work pretty effectively to generate a lot of money, a lot of product, a lot of productivity. And I think it’s problematic because nobody is responsible for the ethics of what that totality puts out. Other than the people at the top, who keep their hands clean.

If my hands are dirty as a leader, then I have skin in the game. I’m in it. I understand what the decisions mean. I’m sharing both the responsibility as well as the spoils. To me, if I’m designing a company that I still want to have exist in 50 years, if I’m designing for 150 years, if I’m designing for sustainability, if I’m designing for a different future, I don’t want everybody to have their hands clean, I want everybody to have their hands a little bit dirty.

The way this shows up in design and in technology is designers or developers who don’t have their user flows, who don’t have their user journeys, who don’t understand why they’re just delivering the screens. They’re just delivering the ones and zeros. They can’t tell you how that piece fits into the other pieces, that holds them back in their craft. And it holds them back strategically, but that’s also what enables them to participate in things that don’t really feel right. And that’s what enables a company to bring in diverse people, but not really include them and have it never really feel right.

I think we overvalue the visionary. I think we overvalue the person who can do everything on their own, and then we become dependent on that person. The company that I want to design, the future that I want to design for our industry, world, everybody’s contributing and everybody is sharing the accountability. I think it’s a different definition of success and a different measure that’s going to get us to different decisions about what we value and different decisions in what we spend our time on.

Last one case in point here. Why the hell is it so damn hard, after 25, 30 years of doing this work, and everybody knows your first cut of what you think the problem is and why it matters, everybody knows, everybody knows that that’s not right. Everybody knows you’ve got to do some real discovery, and really understand your customers or end-users perspective before you put in money and effort into building your product. Everybody knows that.

I have a graph you made, that I use to teach, it’s still the best possible visualization. Why you should figure out your options while it’s cheap to do that rather than expensive. But 30 years later, we’re still having the same effing conversation. And every design team in the world is still going, “They’re not giving us any time for discovery. They just tell us, make the thing and we’ll figure it out later. And we never come back to it.” Nine out of 10 teams out there are saying that. So they know they’re supposed to iterate. They’ve got their pictures of your iterative process and your one, two, three, four, five, and your arrows all day. Nine out of 10 of them don’t do it. Why? Because the definition of success and the, way we assess business value, hasn’t caught up to the way we need to be defining it for the future.

I’m not opinionated about that. Guys, this is really fantastic.

Jesse: I think…

Peter: We’re just here to help you testify.

Jesse: …when it comes to evaluating leaders and the impact of their choices and evaluating them against some success criteria, it’s often a question of your scope of reference, because we often see leaders who make choices that are right for their team, but wrong for the product; right for the product, but wrong for the organization; or right for the organization, but wrong for the users.

Or maybe even right for the users, but still wrong for society. And so as you keep sort of scoping out, you start to see these wider and wider ripples of impact of the choices that the leader makes. And so I think your point is a good one, that where that sociopathy tends to take root is often in the organizations that are most myopic about the wider impacts of the choices that their leaders make.

Billie: Yeah, I would agree with that. I would definitely agree with that.

Peter: As you were talking about the totalitarianism and the kind of atomization of activity within an organization, I realized there’s a devil’s bargain as we think about teams and team building, which is we can create highly actualized teams,  and encourage them to behave in all the best ways. But that team is its own little unit and there’s dozens, if not hundreds, of them in some of these organizations and the risk is a hundred highly actualized successful teams, whose efforts when all added up lead to these societally problematic outcomes. Because we’ve broken up what each team is doing, they can feel super empowered, super positive about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, but there’s still something happening behind the curtain, where all of that effort that’s embraced with genuine idealism still can be shaped and manipulated. Ideally, it’s manipulated towards positive goals, but it’s most often manipulated towards this gestalt where the whole is so different from the sum of the parts that you don’t know, it becomes the Skynet or the monster that just gets unleashed, that even the creators, even the most senior folks, don’t realize what they’ve done, and in the worst of outcomes it can actually be steered or directed towards what we would consider nefarious ends.  

How do we help folks understand that, to what Jesse was saying, those concentric circles out and out and out. Their role, however small, however seemingly focused, it’s tying into something ever larger. And, how do we provide  lenses or views that allow people to get that kind of powers of 10, like in the Charles and Ray Eames movie, so that you’re always looking at kind of multiple levels.

Billie: Yeah. I always call that a funnel of abstraction, another concept that came from political science. If you’ve got the spirit of the law at the top, the letter of the law at the bottom, like the specific statute at the bottom, and the why and what social good it’s supposed to affect at the top, design problems or business problems work the same way, where you’ve got business strategy or the vision up at the top and all the way at the bottom is every specific detail decision that you would need to make.

Most of us are going to have a part of that funnel of abstraction, where we’re most comfortable. We like looking at the system and understanding the why and the big vision. And if we only lived up there, we’d never get anything done. So the way we get things done is we come all the way down. What does that vision mean for what I’m going to do today?

So when I’m teaching, particularly your junior to mids, they will, you know, they’ll start up here. Sure. And then they get down here and then it’s, “Oh, well, what’s your goal on this screen? When you click this, what happens if you don’t go all the way back up?” That’s how you ended up down the rabbit hole.

I think it’s easier to teach your junior to mids, to come up than it is to teach your leaders to effectively come all the way down and back up again, to have people at all levels, interacting in the middle and helping each other specialize, but also stay informed the real contextual details.

So this relates to what you were talking about before, in terms of leaders staying close to the creative work, so that the most effective leaders at a company like that are the ones when were able to, for example, come into a critique session, see the work that an individual designer has done, and if they’re too focused, be, like, “Alright, bring me up a level of abstraction.” It helped me understand what part of the problem have you broken out, and what are the decisions you’ve made, and which are the decisions that you need input on.

The most effective leaders, even if they’re not the ones who are making those detail-level decisions, when they see what their teams have done, can help connect the dots to that big vision and help assess, “Do we make the right call? Do we make the best call or not? How would we be able to tell?” So the idea of being able to move up and down those levels of abstraction, and share context, is how you end up counteracting that tendency for everybody to be a little bit too far away.

There were a few conversations that I think should be happening in every room where there is. Creative work being done, whether they’re physical or virtual rooms, certainly any kind of software design and development. This is another one of those things.

It seems like it’s not brain surgery. Why is it that hard? But for some reason we still haven’t figured it out. Here’s what it looks like. Let’s just talk about the tradeoffs more.

Why are we not talking about tradeoffs? Here’s what the end users need. Here’s what the technology can support now and what it would take to get it to doing another thing. Here’s what the business needs. There’s always going to be some tradeoff. Not that, What’s it going to cost us? What are the trade offs? In any business discussion, in any set of questions about what we should do and why, you’ve got the business, the customers are end users, and you’ve got the technology, and there’s always going to be a tradeoff between the three of them. And you want somebody who can effectively speak for each one, and you want to make a choice, and you want to figure out at what point will we assess, “Have we made the right choice? And when can we change our minds?”

And I see too many leaders who assumed that that’s their domain and their domain only, and they’re doing their teams a disservice because at every level you need to be having those conversations. Even the junior designer, junior PM, and junior developer who are working on fulfilling the requirements for screen X, Y, or Z. Should it go in this order or this order? I don’t know. Usually what they end up doing is, Which one do you like better? Which one have you already done? Because they don’t have the information they needed in order to say, well, okay, let’s go up a couple levels of abstraction. What does the business need?

What’s at stake? If we choose X over Y at every level, we need to empower our people to discuss risks and tradeoffs and benefits, and to be comfortable with their decision making.

I don’t see enough decision-making at the junior to mid-level. So then I see people who are new leaders suddenly have no idea how to make decisions. And they’re guessing. You shouldn’t have to guess. People are covering for too much insecurity. When, if we got comfortable at every level, let’s talk about the trade offs. Let’s put our cards on the table. If we choose X, what are we not choosing?

Jesse: This just highlights that as many things as have changed since you first joined Ask back in the late nineties with no leadership experience of any kind, and having it just put in your lap and being asked to sort it out, I think that that is still the case all these years later. That there are many, many design leaders who have not had the opportunity to really exercise the muscles they’re actually going to use as leaders before the role was given to them.

Billie: I think you’re absolutely right. This also gets into why you hear so many leaders waxing philosophical about the days that they got to do the creative work, because they become people managers where they just have to give performance reviews. If we worked decision-making and peer leadership and modeling more into our junior to mid-levels, We wouldn’t have that much of a crisis of what leaders are supposed to do.

Peter: Yeah, that’s interesting because we explicitly don’t give them authority, And I don’t think I thought about what is the progression of decision making ability that you want to encourage within people as they develop. I actually am working with a client and we have this fairly bright line between—and I’m responsible for it, so I might be guilty here—we’ve created this fairly bright line between a senior designer and a lead designer. And that bright line is one of leadership, is that ability to direct others, and there’s recognition that the senior designer is a very strong craftsperson, but doesn’t lead others.

And then the leader has that ability to see beyond themselves, and affect the work of other people. Which feels like a quantum distinction, but what I think you’re saying is that it shouldn’t be. It’s almost not fair to say, “One day, you don’t get to make decisions. And then the next day you’re responsible,” without having provided some path to that.

Billie: Absolutely. If you think about it, even the most junior designer is making decisions. You’ve got a design system and you’ve got a new design problem. Where do you apply an existing pattern and where do you choose to make something new? That’s a basic decision that even a junior has to figure out.

Are we giving them the tools that they need in order to make the decisions that are within their remit? And are we giving them effective ways to you assess what decisions did you make? Are we giving them opportunities in critique to say, “All right. Here’s as far as I’ve gotten with my best thinking, here are the decisions that I’ve made. Does anybody have issues with these things? Am I missing something?” Training people to present the right thing and to ask the right questions. That’s why we have to model it ourselves.

What I’m getting at is the definition of success. So if I want my juniors to still be working here in five years and to be leaders and to have knowledge that they’re able to disseminate, that is more valuable than somebody I would hire in off the street. How am I growing them? What am I giving them to indicate that their investment in me is as valuable as my investment in them?

Another thing that I’ve,got for you. Just my back pocket, a practice that I have found helpful, I was thinking about the thing that you said about finding a trusted dissenter. A practice that I’ve started with some of the people I’ve developed a closest peer relationship with, the people I’m working with most often, is a cadence of “more of, less of,” So, a lightweight way to offer feedback to each other, like once a month, once a week, or whatever.

“Hey, we’re working on this thing together. Can you think of anything that I could do more of, or less of in this next round of whatever to help our working relationship.”

It’s lightweight enough that if you get into a practice of it, it’s kind of like Pilates. You’ll develop that comfort with discomfort muscle a little bit.

Peter: I’ll take your word on anything having to do with Pilates.

Jesse: Pilates is great Peter, you should try it sometime

Peter: Sure.

Jesse: And that wraps up another episode of finding our way. Thank you to Billie Mandel for joining us, you can find Billie on the internet at http://billiemandel.com.

You can find me and Peter on the internet too. You can find us on LinkedIn.

You can find us on Twitter. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg.  This podcast has a website, https://findingourway.design/. There you’ll find every episode, every transcript, ways to contact us. Please reach out, send us your feedback. We live and die by it. We’ll see you soon.

Peter: Vulnerability and trusted dissenters…

Jesse: Totalitarianism…

Billie: Only you can get me talking about totalitarianism on a leadership podcast. I fucking love you people

Peter: You know, you gotta, you gotta get past the surface layers of that onion. You gotta keep peeling it to get at the, at the, at the real stuff.

Melissa: So, how do you learn, how do you instill a product culture when even your leadership doesn’t know what that means?

Peter:  I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Together: And we’re Finding Our Way,

Peter:  Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.  

Jesse: On today’s show, despite some audio difficulties, product management consultant and educator Melissa Perri joins us to talk about the view of design from the product management side of the table, the true value that product managers bring to the process, and how designers can collaborate more effectively with their peers in product management.

Peter: We’ve heard from many people and we’ve had our own experiences of challenges between product and UX. I’m curious what you’ve seen in relationships where product and UX, or product and design, are working well together. What is the agreement there? How do they divide up the work, divide up decision making is often a big issue. Who has the call to make certain decisions? What actually works for a healthy relationship between people in those roles?

Melissa: You have to be partners. I’ve seen lot of bad archetypes and it comes down to being partners and seeing yourself as equals, the two halves of it. And the product managers, I try to explain, you are going to be working with designers super closely.

There are certain activities we are going to divide and conquer. Either one of you could do it, but you have to come back and talk about it together. And then there’s certain other things like wireframing, where you should just let your designer do it ‘cause that’s their job, because you need to be going to do the roadmapping and yeah, and making sure that it’s technically feasible to do things, and making sure that we have the launch plan with marketing in place, and making sure that you’re presenting up to the executives, and getting buy-in for your stuff and then scoping it into the business case and figuring out the goals. 

And, the designer could be part of that too, but you have a lot of work over here, and I see that where, where product and UX start to get tense, is because the product manager is trying to do all the design work and all the wireframing and the journey mapping and everything like that. And the designer is, “That’s literally my role.” And it’s because the product manager doesn’t understand that their role is actually all this other stuff that I just listed, not necessarily just the wireframes. Like the basics of wire frames. Yeah. Important.

Just so you understand how users flow. It doesn’t mean that you should necessarily be the one doing that all the time.

So I think there’s this discrepancy between, what should I be doing? versus what should I know how to do or be aware of? A good working relationship I’ve seen on a team level is when a product manager and a UX designer are working really closely through discovery. We plan our research together. We plan our personas together. We are developing these things as partners, right? Yeah. And then as we start to move into the solutioning phase, the designer is going to lead around really understanding what that’s going to manifest as screens or experiences, where the product manager, giving input from a business perspective to say, these are how we have to think about these solutions to meet our objectives, to make sure that we could still function as a business.

But you’re also having that healthy tension where you’re like, let’s just make sure that we’re doing right by the user as well. So what can we do to solve users’ needs, that will move business goals, is always how I looked at it.

Jesse: I feel like I have had a lot of experiences with product managers who did not themselves have a clear idea of the value that they brought to the process. And, as a result, I find that I have a hard time articulating the value that product management brings to the process of creating products.

Technology’s there to build the thing and design is there to shape the thing and research is there to understand the people who are going to use the thing. And when I get to PM, I start to have a lot of question marks about exactly why that person is at the table.

Melissa: So as technology gets more and more complex, you’ve got a lot more parts of the company that you have to bring together to launch a successful product out there into the market. It’s not just about designing a great solution. How do I make sure that solution gets launched?

Well, it targets the right people. It gets marketed. Well, all that information gets carried over to how do I make sure it’s priced well, how do I make sure that it’s still sustainable over time? And then how do I prioritize the order of those things, to account for things like that. The cost of delays, scoping, moving into new markets, unlocking the potential of the revenue.

There’s all these different things that you could possibly do, but now you have to evaluate it from a perspective of, there’s money out there. How much money is there out there? Do we have the capacity to actually take that money?

Because we understand the needs of that market, we can do it as a team, and we have a good plan on how we’re going to go out and discover that, and test it,  and actually get into it. So, it becomes a very business-focused role at the top. And sometimes design plays a critical role in manifesting those things.

But that strategy of, Where do you want to go? And what does it actually take to build to get there? That’s where I see product really coming into play. And then the order, in the focus of how to do it. 

When I come into companies to help with a product transformation or something, the biggest issue that I see is nobody’s focused. Everybody’s trying to solve 15,000 problems at once. I always do this thing when I come in. I talk to all the teams and I’m like, What are you working on? I start to map it out. I’m like, okay, let me write down everybody’s highest priority.

And I’m like, Why are you working on it? And then I go up to the next level and I go up to the next level and go all the way to the top. And then you could see at the top will say, “This is the most important thing we can do.” And I’m like, “Cool, 10% of your people are working on that. Why? Right. Like why 10%?” Because all these things come up and nobody’s really forming that strategy of how do we tackle this market, enter this market, or just grow in general. In a disciplined way, placed with an intent. And I think what product does is bring intent into the process at every level, to keep everybody focused around what are the most important things, and product at the top looks very different than products on the team level.

And I don’t think you need, I tell companies, too, I don’t think they need 7,000 product managers. I think a lot of people honestly have too many product managers in their companies and they need more designers. I would say that in a heartbeat.

Peter: I’m laughing ‘cause we talked about this a couple of episodes ago and, I see this again and again: companies having too many product managers and they keep hiring more. And my sense is, product managers are a promise of possible new value.

If you have a product manager, they can now help you create new value. And so if we have more product managers, there’s more opportunity for new value. I don’t know if that’s why, but I can’t understand this desire to just keep hiring product.

Melissa: It’s not that. It’s agile, it’s scrum, that did it. Those companies are the ones that call me. They’re like, well, we have 2000 product managers and none of them have ever done product management before, so we need you to come train them. So, that’s, like, my email inbox literally every day.

And I’m like, so why do you have 2000 product managers? First of all, what are you building that warrants having 2000 product managers? Because you are probably spinning up stuff in solutions that don’t, actually, aren’t a product. So they were a project and he put somebody on it like a project manager. You have to spin it up. And now they moved on to the next thing. So you’ve got like a hundred products just sitting there that nobody uses, or like two people use each one of them. And this happens, especially in the enterprise, all over the place. But what happened is, when scrum came out and everybody started adopting scrum, they all had teams.

And scrum basically said, we need at least one product owner on every scrum team. So they said, okay, well we’ve got 10,000 developers, so, okay. Let’s divide that by five and seven. And that means we have to have that many product owners. But that doesn’t mean that you need somebody there just running every single user story you possibly think of. And most of the time they make those user stories up because that’s how they teach them in scrum.

This product owner role, the way they teach it, too, is very not like the way that I teach people how to do product management. ‘Cause you become, like, a backlog jockey where you’re just, like, writing stuff and handing it out to teams and I’m like, that’s useless, that’s not a product manager to me. It has no value whatsoever in it. 

How do we really pull a strategy together? Where we look at it from a business perspective, a customer perspective, and a technology perspective, make sure it all works and then break it down so that we prioritize it and then enable the team to go after it. And that’s where I think the value is on having a product where I’ve seen them bring value to the team.

I think if you have a great product manager on your team, they’re critically thinking about every single aspect, they’re crazy systems thinkers. And if you are building, especially, a software product and a software company, product touches everything.

It affects the way that you make money in your financials. It affects the way that you would market it. It affects the pricing and packaging, it affects the technology, it affects the design. It’s that piece that brings it all together.  And a lot of people in the other roles, or in functional silos where they’re not thinking about it holistically, Is this a thing that we can usher out, that’s going to be successful in every aspect, not just successful the way it solves user needs, but also the way it makes us money. Or the way that it’s technologically sound, where we can build on top of it for the future. And that’s where I see product managers thrive is when they do that job, not necessarily when they’re managing a backlog.

Jesse: I notice a parallel here between flavors of designers, where you have some designers who are going to be very deep in the concept development, the exploratory strategic kind of design work. And then you have other designers who are going to be very tactical and they’re going to be about crafting perfect artifacts and that kind of thing.

And it sounds like there’s a similar continuum, or tension, in product management between this, it sounds like, a product strategy kind of a function versus, as you described it, the backlog jockey, which is, frankly, the flavor of product manager that I have more often been exposed to, which is really a requirements wrangler. and not someone who really brings a point of view.

And I think that’s the thing that I’m trying to get at, is what is the perspective or the point of view that product management brings to that collaborative process. You talk about holism, and it’s great to have one person who is aware of all the different facets of a problem. How does the product manager bring that sense of holism to the entire team?

Melissa: A lot of it’s in the communication. It’s also managing their expectations of the executives. Where I see a lot of people struggle is talking them through the choices that they have to make as well from a prioritization perspective at the top.

They’re not aware of the trade-offs, and a good product manager presents that from a holistic perspective of, there’s trade-offs in pricing/packaging, there’s trade-offs in the way we market this, and trade offs in the way we design it, so they’re really taking that and speaking that language of the executives, or they’re bringing that perspective back to the teams to help them understand what needs to be done with the solution. 

I see that flavor of design you’re talking about, that’s very strategic. Like, I’ve met them, I’ve worked with them, and they’ve been some of the best designers I’ve ever worked with my life. And I think those people are usually more on the strategy side things, working with the product managers.

And that’s where that relationship really comes out to play. I think when you get into the solution side of it, that’s where I still think you need some oversight around the solution and figuring out how it manifests, or how it could affect other pieces. But, from the perspective of what do our products really look like, and how does it function as a system, into like the user’s interactions and stuff like that, I think that’s pretty much the designer’s job. That’s what they’re there for.

And I encourage my product managers to just get out of some of that stuff and let the designer lead. They should be working with the developers. And you just want to make sure that it’s not going to adversely affect the business needs, or the requirements of other teams, or the dependencies that are around other parts of the organization.

The purpose of the product manager, to me, is to help scope out and prioritize what we’re working on, with intent.

And that’s the piece, the intent behind why we do things, because you could build 50,000 things if you wanted to, but what’s the right thing? 

So discovering what’s the right thing to build is not necessarily a one-person job. I think it’s involving the team in it. And I think the product manager’s purpose is to be the person who can help steer that, and make sure that we’re all tracking towards it and helping represent that right thing back to the board and executives.

So, I think the view that I see product managers bring in there is, How do we unlock business value by solving customer value? And that’s the bridge that I see them bring. Whereas designers I think can definitely be in tune with the business and I’ve seen a lot of them do that. I think they get very focused into the customer value piece and I don’t believe there is any business value without customer value, but it’s what are the layers and the levers that we can pull as a business to help them lock that customer value and make it profitable for us.

The pushback I see from the product side against designers is they’re, like, well, they’re only focused on the customer value, but you know, we can’t run a business, we would have no jobs here, if we only looked at doing what’s best for the customer.

You could have the best customer value in the world, but if you’re not pricing it or packaging it correctly, it could completely kill your company. 

How do we take that customer value and package it into a solution that’s also desirable for our market and feasible and viable, bringing those things back together there.

Peter: I appreciate your use of the word intent as what the product manager brings, as it connects to a definition of design, I think, that comes from Jared Spool and we used it in our book, Org Design for Design Orgs, which is that design is the rendering of intent.

In the past I had thought lot of designers being responsible for the intent as well, but I kind of like this idea that someone’s responsible for the intent, and then design is, How do we take that intent and make it manifest in some way? And you’re locating the responsibility for intent with product management.

As you were defining your ideal product management state, it reminded me of what I would consider almost more old school product. Like we’ve almost lost our way. It had been well understood 10, 15, 20 years ago, and then it’s gotten corrupted over time into these backlog jockeys and that kind of thing.

The role that you’re talking about of product manager is fairly senior. It wouldn’t make sense to have someone with that pricing and packaging, and executive presence and vision, et cetera, et cetera, on a team of eight people, you know, paired with a designer and working with five engineers. That group can make a feature. They can’t really build a product. 

And so what is the relationship between the product manager, that role as you’ve defined it, and the teams doing the work? Is there one product manager working with four teams, five teams, eight teams? Are there still product people on those teams, product owners, or do we not even need that? Is it more you just call them scrum masters, in terms of what you need for a JIRA jockey? You don’t pretend there’s a product person at that level. 

Melissa: If you had asked me this maybe five years ago, my answer would have been, well, there needs to be a product manager on every team. Like, would have wholeheartedly said that. I think the issue is that there does need to be a product manager on many teams right now.

And the reason is just the maturity of the way that we work together. I think if you have a mature team with software developers and designers who, given good direction and intent by a product manager, can then look at things and work together to scope out how work gets done and take the lead on it… don’t think you need a product manager. 

What I think it really comes down to is the maturity of the team and the ability for the product manager to build context with the team and capacity for the team to understand that context and feel comfortable with it enough to make their own decisions.

One of the top things that product owners on the team level have told me is that, “I don’t have time to work on the strategy because all I do every day is answer questions from the developers.” And if you are answering questions from the developers that often, it means that you failed at your job to build context about what you’re building with them, so now they have nothing to really go off of. So of course, they’re going to come back to somebody and be like, “What am I supposed to work on today?” Because you haven’t given them enough of a vision. 

And that’s why I think companies gravitate towards having one product manager on every team, because now the team’s like, “What do I need to work on?” And the product managers were responsible for that, in the scrum terms, and then they just start putting lists on backlogs that are not scoped. There’s no boundaries around it. 

Jesse: Yeah. I think that context-setting is really important because, to your point, a checklist is not a vision and, it can be easy, for I think the product manager especially, to get into this cycle of just feeling like your role is to be the one to keep answering those little detailed questions.

But I notice that that context, I have found often, has been provided by design because design has described the various features in context with one another, in a holistic experience and experience vision that they’ve crafted and are delivering.

And I think that I find that context a little bit harder to come by for myself when it is formulated less from an experiential point of view and more from a functional point of view, and in a lot of ways that mindset hasn’t really left us, in terms of the way that a lot of folks do their jobs.

I wonder about where the experiential and the functional come together and how you see the role of a product leader versus the role of a design leader in the articulation of that context to help drive those day-to-day decisions.

Melissa: Yeah, I agree. 

I always approach it from an experience perspective. Like that’s just how I figure things out, inward to outward, first taking the point of the user. I’ve seen other people in product approach things from more of a financial perspective to see how the business model works. And I’ve seen people do it from a functional perspective of what are all the requirements in this market that’s needed, or from a market perspective. So part of this, I’m saying, is biased by the way that I think,  compared to the way the other product managers are thinking.

But one of the pieces I see in that is, there is a functional requirement perspective from a product brain that you would bring in, where I’m going, “Okay, this market is characterized by these types of people and this is what the needs are and here’s our product over here, and here’s the gaps of the functionality that’s needed to solve those types of needs.”

One of the things that we would do is, having one of our user researchers, super senior designer, very much in the discovery phase that you’re talking about, when companies were exploring their product strategy and figuring out where to go, should we do what she called deep insights with them, where she would go out and we’d break down your hypothesis together. And we provide the context and the direction around it, and she would go deep with the customers and come back with a synthesis of, here’s where the gaps really lie. And this is what’s not holding up.

So, we’d partner on these two things, then, to go, “Okay, you’re discovering all these gaps. I’m thinking about the financial implications of going after one thing versus another thing, and how we prioritize those gaps.” And then once we get to a good point, we start to synthesize that and then deploy it to the team so that they can surface up what are the right solutions to actually solve those problems that we’ve now prioritized at the top. 

Jesse: One thing that was always a part of our practices at Adaptive Path, and has been a part of how a lot of folks have done this work, has been to use prototyping in some form as a way of validating concepts before you get to a fully-baked product strategy. Before you get to that level, where you’re ready to hand something off to a team.

I’m curious about whether that’s ever been a part of your process. And if so, how that has played out in that dynamic, how a vision gets created and held, in that partnership between product leadership and design leadership.

Melissa: Yeah, a hundred percent. For instance, one team, we’d have a director of product. I think we had three product managers underneath there. And they reported up to a VP of Product in a big corporation with many product lines.

The director of product and the VP of product we’re brainstorming, like, what can we do for our product line to introduce a new upsell or feature set? What’s the problem that we haven’t solved there’s actually a lot of money in? And the product director goes out, and research does a lot of market research first to understand if some of these potential ideas actually hold any water. 

Okay, we’ve got some data saying they do. All right. Let’s bring in the design director. Both of these are now pairing together, and we were starting to say, what’s our customer research hypothesis? Are we going to go out there and talk to your existing customers or new customers to figure out if this hypothesis that we found in the market actually holds water?

Go out and do our user research, right. Come back and say, there’s something here. Cool. Now we’ve got the beginning of business case, saying that if we solve this problem, there’s money here. There’s something that we can actually upsell.

Now, how do we figure out what the solution is? To go say, I need a little bit of money to test this, from the executives.

Now we gotta figure out how to solve it. And this is where the design director might grab some designers and say, “Okay, let’s prototype, let’s start iterating around solutions and testing them out there with customers. And the product director also got four other teams they’re working with overseeing, but they’re spending half their time making sure this business case is really coming to fruition, doing some more research, really helping this side, but they’re also enabling the team on the other side. 

Peter: You’ve explained the process here for product development.  You’ve talked earlier about matters of scrum and agile. And I’m wondering if you ascribe to any common product development process, two week cycles, three week cycles, this, that, the other thing, ‘cause what you described, I don’t know if 

I would say it’s waterfall, but you want to figure out what you’re doing before you do the next thing. And one of the challenges, I think, some UX types like myself have, is my desire to think before acting.

Melissa: I feel like anytime somebody is like, “Oh, I need a week to think,” people go, “Oh this is waterfall.” And that’s just bullshit, honestly. I hate that concept because here’s what I see when people take scrum religiously.

When I was leading a transformation at this company, we had 5,000 software developers and 350 product managers I was training who’ve never done it before. And they had adopted this really strict form of scrum. And they were like, well, we have three-times-a-year releases, and we do two-week sprints. And at the beginning, after the first release, we get a sprint zero, which is two weeks to figure out what we’re going to do for the next three months.

I was like, “How can you shove all that into two weeks?” Like, you can’t do that. And they’re like, “Oh, this is the only time that we can’t be delivering.” And I was like, “That’s dumb.” It should just be an ebb and flow where we’ve got this time;  we don’t know what we should be doing.

We have higher levels of uncertainty. Okay. Let’s go make that a little bit more certain. Now let’s go test, let’s iterate on it. And then when we feel high levels of uncertainty, now we can break that down into an iterative cycle to release it. And I think agile works really well if you have some level of certainty around the solution as the right vision or direction to go after.

I think it’s all about shortening the cycles of how long these take, the mount of time that you should spend in the research phase should be proportional to the risk of what you’re actually building. So if you’re building an entire new business line, like, so you were doing the Apple iPhone, you think Steve jobs gave people two weeks to go, “You figure that out.” Like, no. Right. 

Peter: It’s more like 10 years.

Melissa: Right. So it’s not that they’re spending 10 years in a, “Ooh, let me just do some market research” mode and like check the numbers out there. They’re prototyping, they’re putting it out there and they’re making sure that it’s awesome before they go spend all their money launching it and doing all these big marketing campaigns. 

And I think that’s what people don’t understand. There’s things that companies do internally that you will never know about. They want you to think that it’s magic because that’s their selling point, just observing something from the outside and being like, they just do big bang releases, that’s not how that happens. 

Same thing for agile. You just watched people do scrum. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re successful. 

Going back to, you were saying about, Where did product management go wrong? It came out of all these companies doing a big bang, agile transformation. And they took all these subject matter experts or project managers, and they said to them, “You’re now a product owner.” And they were like, “Oh, we don’t know what that means.”

And, starting about six or seven years ago, that’s where a lot of my consulting came from. And when people now can look and say, “Oh, there’s no good product managers out there,” they’re looking at some of those places. 

Never been trained. They have no product leaders to learn from. I’ve been in organizations with 2000 product managers and nobody, including senior leadership, has ever done that role before. So, how do you learn, how do you instill a product culture when even your leadership doesn’t know what that means?

And that’s where we’re getting companies, I think, misunderstanding what product management is. There is no value in a backlog jockey. I think there’s value in bringing a partner to the team to help determine what the intent is, like we were saying, it’s just that, I think companies adopted these practices, thinking that it was a holistic, and some of these agile consultancies, honestly, sell it like the panacea of the world.

They’re like, “Oh, just adopt scrum. That’s going to make everything great.” And you’re like, “No, that’s just one piece of it.” Like there’s so many other things that it takes to build great software. And you’re just looking at one piece of it and thinking it applies to everything. And that’s where I think we get into trouble with all this.

Peter: You had a quote in your book that I love, which is, “I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and I have never seen it work well.”

Peter: Something your question leads to, was a question that we got a little while ago where, there’s this one design leader in particular, who’s like, “I’m working with product owners who don’t know their job. They’re just essentially order takers for someone else. And so now I, as the design leader, have to figure out why we have these requirements, ‘cause I want to build something that people will use.” And this design leader found herself having to fight this internal set of expectations in order to do what she thought was the right job.

So I’m wondering, based on your experience, what have you seen that allows the conversation to change? How have you gotten companies to let go of this dogmatic view of scrum or agile in the way that you’ve been describing and embrace other approaches? In part for those who might be listening to this podcast, like things that they could try within their organizations to push back when they see that things are evidently not working out. But no one knows what else to do.

Melissa: Especially if you’re on a team, a lot of people just feel powerless. They’re like, “I’ve got no pull here. I’ve got no sway. I’ve got no authority to do anything.” I say the best thing you could do is go ask people what they expect to happen from a metric standpoint when you released that, and then measure if it really did, because now you just started a conversation about it.

Usually all it takes is that first question. What do we expect to happen when this launches? And then what timeframe like, do we expect 10,000 users to signup, do we expect to increase retention by 40%? And is that a six month thing or a two month thing? When you start having those conversations, leadership usually goes, “Oh, I never thought about that.” And then people will start asking those questions, which is great. So I think if anybody’s not managing towards those outcomes, just starting to ask, like, okay. Cool. That sounds great. No pushback. See everybody get angry. I used to be angry like this too. I just get mad at people telling me what to do. Yeah. I’d be like, I’m not going to do it. Like, you don’t even know what you’re doing. Right. And that’s not the right approach, although I’ve tried it, so I can vouch that it’s not the right approach. But your approach is more like, okay, cool,  I’m on board. What is this going to do? What do you think will happen? What are your expectations? It’s just gets the conversation going that you can start roll down into those gaps and it makes people more aware of what they’re doing has a lack of intent.

It was funny. I was just talking to another professor yesterday about reframing things. ‘Cause he was teaching it from a sales perspective and he’s like, “Have you ever had to go into a sales meeting where somebody’s asking for something, and it’s not really what they need, and how do you reframe it?”

And I was like, “That’s literally my daily life.” Um, cause everybody comes to me and they’re like, we want to do a product transformation and we want to train all of our product managers and I’m like, “Great. So what have you done to enable that what they’re going to learn is sticking.”

They’re like, “Oh, what do you mean?” And I’m like, “Okay, well, what kind of product strategy do you have going on? Great. Like what’s the most important things that you could be building?” “Oh, we don’t know.” I’m like, “Okay. So I’m going to teach them that they have to look at that first to figure out how they should be scoping down their work and what they could do in line for the goals, so without that, they’re probably gonna come to you. Like I could train them, but they’re going to come to you and ask for that. So are you prepared to answer those calls?” “Oh no.” “No worries. Okay. So let’s work on that first.”

Peter: At some point, you have to wonder how these companies are in business.

Melissa: Well, it’s a lot of them found really interesting problems. It’s a problem that they’ve managed to solve somehow, that’s just good enough for the moment, that people really need it. And they’ve made a lot of money doing that.

If you’re a startup, and you’re starting this from scratch, you don’t have any runway so you are spending the time to get it right, because otherwise you never make it out of startup phase.

If you don’t do the research, if you don’t find that product market fit, you are never making it to the next phase. 

But when you make it to the next phase, a lot of companies are like, “Oh, I don’t know what to do next.” So they just start spinning their wheels. And they forget to go back and do what they did in the startup mode, which is all that research to really figure out and define what comes next. Because I think they panic, and if you hit the growth stage, taking VC money, they’re like OK, you’ve got five years to IPO. And you’re like, “Oh, I’m making $5 million a year right now. How do we get to 150?” And you’re just throwing ideas at the wall, ‘cause you panic and you don’t go, “Well, how did I get to 5 million? Let me think about it. How do I get to 10 million? How do I refactor some of these things and strategically think through it,” they’re like, “Oh, we just build and we just build.” And I think a lot of people associate more features with more money. 

Peter: Well, right? ‘Cause they can assign a value to it. Even if fictional, but they can put them in a spreadsheet.

Melissa: Yeah, I was talking to my students at HBS, they build teams and companies and stuff. And one of them said, “Well, we got like one beta user and I think they’re great and we’re going to build some more features for them. And we’re trying to figure that out.” And I was like, “Why more features?”

Like what – what’s that do. And they’re like, “Well, we just figured that they’d want more features,” “Well, did you ask them about the features you have? Like, are they using those right now?” They’re like, “Oh, we didn’t actually think about that. I just thought if we had more features, we could charge more money,” and I’m like, “Oh, so for like, what’s the core problem you’re solving, right.”

“Well, yeah, that’s right.” Okay. 

And then they take a step back and they go look at it. But I think we kind of adopted that mentality at scale that more is better, more is more money and doubling down on your core problem that you solve and making that really awesome gets lost in the sauce.

Jesse: Yeah, it feels like if prioritization is going to be such a huge part of the value that you deliver, you have to build up your own prioritization filter for yourself. That’s what you need to be able to bring to that. 

Melissa: To me, like, what you were saying, just that the prioritization framework is product strategy. And when I get a lot of product managers who go, I don’t know how to prioritize those things, because you’re missing that product strategy. And a lot of people go, “Oh, our product strategy, we know where we want to be in five years and we know what we’re doing tomorrow.” And I’m like, “Okay, but what’s in the middle of that. Product strategy is that thing that connects that longterm to what are we doing right now? And what do we have laid out for the next two months?

That’s the piece of the prioritization framewor that’s almost always missing in every company.

Jesse: You’ve mentioned research a few times now, as one of the key drivers of that prioritization for you. I mean, obviously the business concerns are there. But I’ve heard you talk about research a lot more than I think I hear most product managers talk about research informing their decisions.

And I’m curious about what you see as the ideal relationship between product management, research, and design as design and research are often very closely aligned, but it sounds like research needs to be driving product management at least as much as it’s driving design, if not more.

Melissa: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I don’t think you can make decisions without understanding what problems your customers have or where you fall short right now. And I don’t think enough companies spend that time really getting into that. If I was going to build a team from scratch today, the first hire I would do is a user researcher.

When you’re a product leader, you don’t have time to go out and do that yourself, So you have to build that relationship into your team and that role to make sure that you’re getting the insights.

I always look at it as, you’re taking all these different inputs and synthesizing them into a direction. And it’s not necessarily synthesizing it into a solution, it’s synthesizing it into a direction. And that’s the intent. 

So I’m looking at qualitative user feedback. I’m looking at usage data. I’m looking at business financials. I’m looking at revenue, cost drivers of what our current products are. Yeah. Or we’re spending money and where we may need to shift spend. I’m looking at trends in the different markets and competitor analysis, and I’m taking all of that information and I’m synthesizing it into, Where do we go next? 

And that’s not, Where do we go tomorrow? That’s where do we go for the next six months? Where do we go for the next year? And that’s that missing middle piece that’s usually gone from companies, to connect the strategy back into what are the teams doing on a day to day basis.

Peter: One of the challenges I’ve seen is, as companies grow, they have product teams. How those teams are defined will vary by company. Sometimes they are actual products that they’re putting in the market. Often they’re different aspects of some larger service experience. If you’re Lyft or Uber, you’re going to have multiple quote “product teams” working on the rider experience. There’s not real products there. It’s all one product. but, you can’t have a team of 200 trying to work on one thing. So you break them up into teams that are able to kind of digest the work. 

And so these product teams get siloed, they focus on what’s in front of them, their metrics, good product teams doing it the way that you would recommend, in terms that they know the outcomes they want to drive towards, they’re doing experiments to get to those outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. 

And so I’ve seen the role of design to almost run contrary to that siloed product organization and have design really just live across the experience, so that designers aren’t quote “embedded” in product teams, designers are responsible for some end-to-end experience and they intersect and interact with these product teams that necessarily have to have their focus in order to do their job. I’m wondering how you see that relationship between the focus of the delivery of these teams that needs to deliver, especially as these companies grow, these end-to-end services that can get quite hairy and complex.

Melissa: Yeah. I’ve worked with companies that were that way and then I’ve seen it organized more through product lines. I think it depends on which type of products you’re building. Where you’re talking about, it seemed to work super well in the services type businesses that you’re talking about.

I’ve seen other places where it’s not a huge user journey all the way through, and you can break the teams up around jobs-to-be-done. These teams are probably not seeing super specific scope and it’s not so technically complex. The team is almost an experience team, rather than a technical team. 

I find when we do org design with product managers, they typically look to put them around, major jobs-to-be-done, around different products, and if feature sets get too complex to manage, we’ll start to break those jobs up into multiple teams to solve it. 

So if you go into each one of those jobs-to-be-done, are those different feature areas? And designers building for that. They’re not necessarily impacting everything across the area, but when you have a totally intertwined journey, where your products plug into that journey, that’s where I see design sitting across everything. It makes total sense.

Jesse: What do you wish design leaders understood better about the role of product management? That if they did understand it, it would improve their relationship with product managers.

Melissa: Ooh, that’s a really great question. I think one of the things is, how much the other systems come into play in making a successful solution. That it’s not just about getting the screens right and experience right for that perspective. That is a piece of building a successful company.  I teach a CPO accelerator group for product leaders trying to become executives. And I was just telling them, your job is no longer just the success of your product at that position. It’s the success of the company. And I see that’s the tension that a lot of people get into with design leaders too.

I think it’s any leader who’s not seeing themselves as beholden to the company’s success, not just their individual solution or their individual feature success or their product success. And I think when both people are in that mindset, the product leaders, the design leaders, they’re both like, I know I will have to make trade-offs with parts of my design to meet the business’s needs, but I also will sit here and advocate for the customer as well, but I’m not going to be unreasonable. I’m going to work with everybody through this because I know it’s best for the company. That’s where I see these relationships work. And I say that, too, to my product managers for salespeople, because product and sales butt heads like crazy.

I’m like, okay, now you’re an executive. You gotta go sit with that VP of sales and know there may be a feature that you weren’t going to plan. But eventually you might have to bump that up just to make sure this company can survive. If that’s the thing that it really takes, we have to be willing to work with that.

We don’t get to operate in a perfect system. It would be great if everything was perfect and we didn’t have to worry about money, and we didn’t have to worry about anything. We build awesome products that people love and not have to worry about the implications. But, at the end of the day, the company has to survive. Otherwise we won’t get to build anything.

Peter: Thank you, Melissa, for joining us. This was great. I actually learned a bunch, and I suspect others will too. So we’ve talked about your book, Escaping the Build Trap. We’ll make sure that everyone knows about that. Where and how else can people find you?

Melissa: if you want to check out my website, it’s MelissaPerri.com. I run a company called Produx Labs as a consultancy, and an online school for product managers that teaches them what to do that’s not scrum, um, productinstitute.com. And I now have a new class for executives where we’re teaching them how to build great product strategies and really move it to the C suite, at cpoaccelerator.com.

Peter: When, when do you sleep?

Melissa: Never. I was up at like four, o’clock this morning. ‘Cause I was like, I have so many ideas! 

Peter: I, yeah, I was just, I was getting tired, just hearing of all the activities and professional things that you’re doing. Well, that’s awesome. So again, thank you so much for joining us and, take care and see you on the internet.

Melissa: Thank you.

Jesse: As always Peter and I want to hear from you. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. You can also find us on our website, http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find an archive of all our past episodes and full transcripts.

We’ll see you next time.

Sally: Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me. You know, cause people are trying to kill you.

Peter:  I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Both: And we’re Finding Our Way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.  

Jesse: On today’s show, design leader Sally Carson of Duo Security joins us to talk about her path to design leadership, growing a design team inside a fast scaling startup, managing your boss, managing burnout, and a whole lot more.

Sally: So I currently lead product design and user research for Duo Security, and Cisco acquired Duo about two years ago now. So I’m now part of Cisco. Yeah.

Peter: And how long have you been at Duo?

Sally: I joined Duo five and a half years ago. Dug Song, the CEO, hired me to build out product design from scratch. They had one user experience designer at that time. But I renamed it to product design at that time, very deliberately…

Peter: From user experience?

Sally: From user experience, yeah. Part of my rationale, why I renamed user experience to product design was to recast it internally within the company, because the engineers and the product managers did have some familiarity with working with the one user experience designer. And I was coming in with a different approach and I wanted to say this isn’t the way that you’ve been operating. This is a different thing, different flavor.

Peter: What was your different approach? How did your approach differ from what they were doing?

Sally: One fundamental difference. I was just able to get resources and budget to actually staff up because I think by the time I joined, it was one designer for maybe 30 engineers and just, you know, that ratio really limits what you’re able to do. I also was intent on bringing in a user research competency and building that out.

So any expectations that had been set in the prior years about how they had operated with the single user experience designer, I wanted to make it clear to everyone that this was going to be a different way of operating, in part, just because we were going to have healthier ratios to start with. So that really changes the type of work that you’re able to engage in.

Peter: So you really wanted just a clean break from the before time to your leadership time.

Sally: Yeah. I’ve found that in general, it’s some of the most challenging work that we do. And we’re talking about driving cultural change. I find it’s easier if you’re working with someone who has no sense of what it means to work with design. It’s almost more difficult if you have someone that has a really strong preconception. They’re like, “I understand exactly what this is,” but their conception of it is different from what you’d like it to be.

Jesse: Enough knowledge to be dangerous, right.

Sally: Yeah. I’ve been interested in, sometimes you all mentioned, change management as opposed to transformation and that nuance, if I remember it’s like the way you defined it, Peter, change management is more like the end state is known and it’s just the process of getting there. Whereas transformation, the end state may not be as well understood. Is that it?

Peter: Right. Exactly. And well, has that been your experience with Duo? Like, were you continually transforming into states that people weren’t quite sure where you were headed?

Sally: It was definitely transformative. There’s an improvisational aspect to it where I sort of had a vision of what we wanted to get to, but the way that I staged it progressively, it did take some, just adapting to the environment at the time, because we were also going through hypergrowth.

So the context was changing. At least every six months, it was a different company.

Peter: Was that a vision that you established when you joined, when it was just you and that one other designer?

Sally: What I came in with was a hodgepodge of what I had seen as best practices throughout my career. Like I think at that point, I would have been about 15 years into my career. And so I had seen one particular shop had done agile really well, and had found a way to integrate design fairly well into agile.

A different shop had healthy ratios, a different shop had really strong research. So I was trying to pluck from the best that I’d experienced and put it together and basically create the design team that I always wanted to work within.

Peter: Had you primarily been in startups up to that point, what was the nature of your background before joining?

Sally: So let’s see. I’m an army brat. I moved all around. Eventually we settled in Virginia and I did go to college. I got a BFA in communication, arts and design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Peter: So you’re a graphic designer.

Sally: Yeah, I got graphic design training. It was really a mixed bag of video, animation, illustration, graphic design, and then amazing faculty that had us reading, you know, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky, which for my 19-year-old brain was probably mostly over my head. But as I reflect back, it’s come in handy quite a lot, you know, just to make sense of, like, the changing media landscape, for example.

Jesse: How did you find your way into digital?

Sally: So I would have been at VCU in the mid-to-late nineties and there was no web component to my schooling, but I was interested in the web and yeah, I just started doing what a lot of folks at that time did, which was just view source, copy, start hacking it, and figure out FTP.

And then I got really lucky because my first job out of school was a small, educational startup In Charlottesville. And they hired me as a full time illustrator, which is pretty extraordinary. But then when I joined, they found out I knew how to code. And they were like, “Oh, you’re upgraded to multimedia developer.” 

I’m really fortunate where I have this career arc, where if you trace my job titles through the years, it’s a complete parallel to what was happening at large within the industry. Like, I was a multimedia developer. I later was a web designer, interaction designer, user experience designer, product designer, like that is how we all do about our titles through the years.

Peter: Sadly those, Radford surveys that everyone has to use, in order to base industry compensation on, still refer to us as, like, web designers. Cause they’re like way out of date.

Sally: Gosh, yeah, come on, Radford. Get it together.

Jesse: Hey, taxonomy. It’s hard.

Sally: It is. Yeah.

Peter: So, how do you go from being a multimedia developer to a design leader?

Sally: I had plans to move up to New York in the summer of 2001. I rented an apartment up there. And I, found a Polish cyber cafe, and they had satellite internet and that was the only high speed in Greenpoint at the time.

And I bartered with them to get high-speed satellite internet on the roof of my Greenpoint apartment building, by redesigning their website.

Peter: Nice.

Sally: And I worked it out with my boss at the time. That startup in Charlottesville, I was like, I have high speed internet up in New York. Let me keep working remotely. And so I moved up. I lost my job within, I don’t know, three or six months.

They were just like, this remote thing is odd and it’s not really working out. And I was like, okay, that’s fair enough. And then there were no jobs. In New York City in particular, there are no jobs. I was unqualified to wait tables, to, you know, be an assistant, to do any kind of administrative work anywhere.

At the time in New York City, the job ads for anything web-related were like secretary / webmaster. Isn’t that so odd where they’re like, this is just pure administrative work and yeah, I couldn’t…

Jesse: And also, can you configure IIS for us…

Sally: Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: How well can you navigate the shell?

Sally: Yeah, very poorly. 

So I became a bike messenger and did that right after 9/11 in New York for about a year.

It was such an amazing job and it’s such an amazing time to have that work, to get to see every secret pocket of the city that most people don’t have access to.

It was just an adventure. 

Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me, you know, ‘cause people are trying to kill you when you’re a bike messenger in New York. Like the taxis hate you there. They are trying to kill you. People are doing dumb things that are dangerous. They’re doing scary things that are dangerous, on purpose. And I just learned how much, the more I would engage and get angry and feed into it, it would build my anger, but if I could just let it go and let it wash over me, and not replay the bad incidents in my mind over and over, just really changed my relationship with how I can deal with difficult people or difficult moments, that was helpful for life and for my career.

Peter: For becoming a manager.

Sally: It’s not like I’m fully enlightened. I do notice now, if I’m replaying a situation that made me angry, it just feeds into it. It makes me more upset. You know, I carry that bad emotion with me. It drains me.

Peter: Right. Right. So you’re a bike messenger. At some point you must get back into design and into design leadership.

Sally: Yeah. I was doing a lot of bartering to get things that I needed, still doing design work. And then, the grand finale of my bike messenger career, I did a East Coast bike trip with two friends of mine, two girls from Virginia. 

We were raising money for cancer research. And the three of us rode our bikes from the border of Canada to Miami in three weeks. 

Jesse: Wow. 

Sally: It was too, it was too much, it was too hard, it was nearly a century, which is a hundred miles, every day for three weeks straight. And the first day of that trip was my first century I ever did. Yeah. 

That trip just taught me, How do you do a hundred miles? You really do it a mile at a time. You know, you’re like, okay, five more miles. And then five more miles. And then five more miles you’re just chopping it up into these little bits.

Thanks for indulging me on all the bike stuff. 

Jesse: Well, I think that bike stuff is relevant, honestly, because I hear a lot of  preparation for leadership there in your various travails on two wheels, whether it’s, shaking off the moment-to-moment bad feelings of contending with aggressive drivers in New York City, or just getting up every day and facing another hundred miles on that long ride. Those are lessons in resilience, honestly, that I think are essential for any leader to learn if they’re going to be successful.

Sally: That’s great. Yeah, it certainly gave me confidence.

As we went through the Virginia portion of that ride, some pals of ours rode that leg with us. And this one guy, Ed, was working at a company called Crutchfield at the time in Charlottesville. And I was just chatting with him, riding next to him. And he’s like, you know, we’re hiring a web designer. So call me up when you get back from this trip. 

So then I became a web designer. Crutchfield is an eCommerce shop and they sell high-end audio and video equipment. And I joined right as they were transitioning away from a print catalog business into an eCommerce business.

We were borrowing a lot of ideas around qual and quant from what Amazon is doing at the time. So we were doing funnel analysis, AB testing, tracking conversion metrics.

So that was great for just learning chops around quant informing product decisions. And then we also partnered it with qual. 

Peter: You mentioned, when you joined Duo, the ratios were out of whack. There was one designer for 30 engineers. So I’m guessing early on, you knew you needed to recruit and hire and build out a team.

That was five and a half years ago?

Sally: Yeah.

Peter: I’m wondering if there are stages of your job, stages of your team, how you evolved, how things evolved around you.

Sally: Definitely. But early on, we just needed to grow and we needed to build a team pretty quickly. And I had joined Duo at… I was four months pregnant with my first and only kiddo, so there was also an external deadline, you know, I needed to build up a little nucleus of a team quickly.

Peter: Five months before you were going to be gone for a while.

Sally: Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to make some hires and got a couple of product designers in, got a user researcher in. And really what I wanted to emphasize with the org was the power of user research. And to quickly try to get us to a place where we’re getting beyond strictly usability testing.

Peter: What was the opportunity for user research? What did you witness that was lacking that you felt user research could address?

Sally: Happily Duo was already so customer centric, they really were, so the stage was set in a really great way for me. Because when we’d bring engineers and product managers to observe the usability testing, it, like, pained them to hear the customer struggling and to watch the customer struggling, which was great.

You know, I didn’t have a team that was dismissive of that kind of feedback. 

Peter: I’m curious how you framed the advocacy for user research. I think we’re seeing that it’s easy to build out design orgs because more designers means more assets. The value of user research is less clear, I think, for these organizations, because they’re not making anything, they’re not producing material…

Jesse: It’s less quantifiable at least… 

Peter: Yeah. And so how were you able to advocate for user research and going beyond the expected usability, into stuff that’s more generative? What were the stories that you found that worked? What were stories that maybe you tried that didn’t work?

Sally: One thing that’s been really beneficial for us is to come and present short consumable research nuggets at all-hands meetings. What I really wanted to get away from was, user research goes off for six weeks and comes back with a 30 page PDF.

It’s very participatory. So I think that’s a high level theme. How can we make design and research as participatory as possible, and really bring people along for the ride, co-create together so that they’re truly invested in it. What that might look like for those early days of usability testing are bringing those engineers and product managers into the room and having glass on one side of the lab.

In a hallway where people are walking by, including our cofounders, so that they can see what’s happening in there, generates a lot of interest.

Jesse: So kind of raising the literal physical visibility of the work. By not having it take place off site or in a sealed off soundproofed room that nobody even knows what’s going on behind that door.

Sally: That’s right. Yep., really exposing it. And then, because we’re bringing them along for the ride, getting them excited about it as a unique differentiator for us. Like, I’m not aware of other cybersecurity companies that have this rich investment in design research. So it becomes a point of pride.

Peter: So you mentioned the CEO’s name… was it Dug? I’m curious to hear more about your relationship with him.

If you’ve listened to some of our past episodes, we talk a lot about relationships and in particular for leaders in the position you’re in, there’s a lot of need to manage up and get, maybe not just Dug, other executives also understanding what you’re doing and onboard.

How have you approached that?

Sally: I had done my own internet of things hardware startup prior to joining Duo, for about three years. And he was an advisor and a mentor to me as a first time founder. So I was learning from him directly through him mentoring me, but also just the modeling, watching how he was running Duo as a super successful startup and doing it in a way that’s so humane and customer-centric and people-centric for the employees. So that was wonderful because coming in,  already having had a foundation with the CEO and a relationship there.  

Chester’s my boss, and he leads engineering. And between Dug and Chester, they both are so sympathetic to what design can do, and the value of investing there. It was so helpful for me. It really set the stage where I didn’t have to work, upstream or fight gravity. You know, I was finally in company where generally they understood the value and they understood why I was there.

I had enough credibility that they trusted me to give them things that they didn’t ask for and to show them why that was valuable.

Jesse: How did you earn that credibility?

Sally: I think in part, having had that relationship with Dug prior to working together. But then, you still have to prove it out in your new organization, even if you have the relationships. It’s so key to deliver some quick wins, even if they’re small in scope compared to what you can ultimately deliver. 

And if they’re resonating with your audience, whether that’s executive stakeholders or someone else within the org, really socialize the crap out of those small wins, you’re trying to build out an early portfolio of case studies where you’re delivering value to the business that’s concrete, that’s credible, that’s resonating.

Jesse: Right, right. What is the role of risk-taking for a new design leader in an organization? Because I’m imagining a leader setting out to go get those quick wins. It can be very easy to choose the safest, least disruptive things to do. So how did taking a chance play into your path at Duo?

Sally: Maybe speaking about cycling relates to this. And before cycling, I was a skateboarder, and in the past I’ve been a bit of an adrenaline junkie. 

Peter: Not anymore. 

Sally: Not anymore. I don’t know. There’s so much adrenaline hammering me from the outside world right now that I’m like, I just want peace.

I just want calm.

Jesse: We’re all on a mountain bike right now.

Sally: Totally. Totally. So risk was a big part of it. That’s kinda been, my M.O. is just take huge swings. I can’t imagine being successful in this role without having a big appetite for risk.

Peter: What were some of the risks that you took?

Sally: I had not gotten formal training on being a good leader, a good manager. I hadn’t had any block-and-tackling on that. And I was building out a big team. So for me, there was a lot of learning along the way, just on the basics of being a strong leader, being a good manager, and kudos again to Chester because he has done such an incredible job of building out what he and I sometimes called a “leadership factory.” When you’re in hyper-growth, you have to develop successive waves of leaders, your top talent, ICs that are interested in the management track. How are you going to develop them into managers in 18 months? And. Who are the next wave of directors that could be credible in that role and how can you set them up for success and not extend them beyond what they’re capable of now.

And we all go through the same training when you join as a manager. And, that helps because we have a shared language and understanding. There’s a shorthand when we’re using the same nomenclature, but there’s a really high investment in Duo around professional development. 

I have not encountered an organization better than Duo, that’s better at helping people become first-time managers and then grow their careers from there. It’s very thoughtfully done and we put a lot of investment there ‘cause we want to retain people long-term.

Peter: What, if any, distinction do you make between management and leadership?

Sally: Yup. Oh, this is good, Peter. ‘Cause I feel like you have some thoughts on this if I, if I recall.  And it’s good, ‘cause I think you’ll disagree.

Peter: Well, but I’m wondering because it sounded to me almost like you were using management and leadership interchangeably, and we’ve discussed them as distinct.

Sally: Oh, that’s so good.  I do make a distinction between leadership and management. I think it’s a Venn diagram in my head. There are managers who are not leaders. There are leaders who are not managers, but there are managers who are leaders and, anybody can be a leader in a sense, there are people who are influential over the organization’s culture and they might be individual contributors who don’t have any direct reports, but the way that they carry themselves is either an embodiment of how we all want to show up organizationally, or maybe they’re highly influential over the product or other aspects of the organization. 

There’s a great book that I love called Speaking as a Leader. And I kind of use it as a tuneup every six months. I’ll just listen to like 20 or 30 minutes of it to refresh myself. And it’s so handy because it talks about how, at any given time as a leader, you need to be really clear about what your current talking points are, what you’re saying.  

Being thoughtful about the way you show up and being aware of your audience at any given time. It requires high emotional intelligence, but sort of a different flavor of emotional intelligence. There’s the one-on-one emotional intelligence. There’s also power in reading a room, like the one-to-many kind of emotional intelligence.

Not just being mechanistic and transactional, the way that managers who aren’t leaders can be, but really reading the room, maybe surfacing things that are going unspoken that are too dangerous for individuals to say and using your role power as a leader to go ahead and put voice to things that people who are maybe underrepresented or don’t hold that much power would be putting themselves at risk to say.

It’s easier to train people on management. Are you doing your one-on-ones? Are you building trust with your direct reports? You know, here’s how you delegate work. But it’s a great entry point into leadership at large because management is a little bit more accessible.

It’s a little more like, okay, here’s your checklist. As a first time manager with a few direct reports, make sure you’re doing these things. Just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And you’ll inevitably encounter new challenges, So there’s no real way to practice it without just doing it.

Peter: What are the leadership skills that have been the hardest for you to acquire and learn?

Sally: This is where I get kind of selfish. I’m like, “Ooh, maybe Peter and Jesse can teach me some things here.”

Peter: That’s fine.

Sally: Honestly, it’s been such a joy to be able to hold one position for so many years because there’s things I learned in the course of five and a half years that I wouldn’t possibly have had the opportunity to learn if I had only stayed for two or three years. You know, a product manager might make a key decision on strategy, leave the company. And I get to see how that played out over the next few years. And they didn’t get that learning cycle.

Then I notice how I’m changing, my team is changing, the context is changing right now. 

What’s top of mind for me is energy management. I have days full of meetings and there might be a really important meeting at 3:00 PM where my energy is really flagging. And I’m really just like mentally fatigued because of context switching, so that afternoon slump, if that happens to collide with a really critical meeting, that’s intellectually intense or even emotionally intense, that’s one of my biggest challenges, is just like managing energy. Staying mentally sharp when I need to, right? ‘Cause it’s almost pointless for me to be there if I’m not mentally sharp for some of these conversations. So what do you got for me? You got any advice?

Jesse: Yeah. Well, in general, I think design leader happiness, and day-to-day satisfaction tracks very strongly with the leader’s ability to control their own calendar.

Sally: So true. Yeah.

Jesse: And, to the extent that you are able to create space in your calendar for yourself to give yourself what you need to show up at your highest level of capability, that’s, what’s gonna make you successful.

It’s challenging, though, because in most environments, design leaders don’t have enough authority over their calendar. They are working to rhythms that are set by other departments. 

Peter: I’m a fan of the 20-to-30 minute coffee nap.

Sally: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. 

Peter: It seems silly, but if you can take it at the lunch break, if you can give yourself an hour at lunch and you spend that first half hour eating and the second half hour trying to doze, even if you close your eyes and try to ignore stimulus for half an hour and you don’t sleep, you will reset a bit.

Because I’m like you, I’m not great with intellectual energy in the afternoon. I try to do all my intellectual energy in the morning, and then in the afternoon, that’s where I’m doing more kind of administrative stuff. But if I have to do intellectual energy in the afternoon, I will take a nap. If I can get even 20 minutes to try to refill my energy cup, so I can be alert.

You know, I know people who burn out, even when things are fine, ‘cause they just keep working.

There’s a category of person who keeps working, and I think a lot of folks burn themselves out unwittingly, unknowingly. 

That said, burnout is also organizational, contextual, situational, right? Certain contexts lead themselves to burnout. It sounds like Duo is actually not one of those. The prosocial culture you’ve been talking about, I’d be surprised if burnout was a problem, just because of sensitivity that the leadership has had.

Jesse: It sounds like people are really watching out for each other there, which is the big thing that leads to burnout in so many organizations. That there basically isn’t anybody watching to notice that you’re burning yourself out over there.

Sally: That’s right. I’m so lucky the culture is so healthy at Duo and I try to not take it for granted because it has been so long since I’ve been an employee elsewhere. I think Yahoo is really the last place I was an employee and that would have been 2005-6.

You’re making me think of something as you’re talking about burnout. I think I’ve experienced two flavors of burnout. I’ve experienced the one where I’m just simply overworking and maybe something like adrenal fatigue, if that’s a real thing. And some of that for me has been not appreciating my own value. What I mean is I need to over-perform, I need to overdo it, I need to overdeliver because I didn’t have the intrinsic confidence in the value that I’m bringing. And really have worked hard to try to train myself out of that and say, this is what I’m able to give today. And I understand that that’s valuable and that’s why I’m here. That’s why they’ve asked me to be here, yeah.

Jesse: I think that’s a real pitfall, especially for new leaders who are like, “I’m moving into leadership for the first time. I feel like I’ve taken on the mantle of leadership.” Right? And they put all these expectations on themselves about how they now need to show up, that is different from how they were showing up before.

And it’s true. Leadership does have its own set of requirements, but people build that up into this thing, especially that they need to be the hardest-working person on the team by every perceivable measure, in order for them to continue to earn their place at the head of the table, so to speak.

Sally: That’s so true. That’s so true. Really, they’re doing their team a disservice because they need to model to their team taking care of themselves. Taking vacation time, not sending those late night emails. 

Peter: I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize the importance of modeling. They just, they tend to…

Jesse: Do, as I say, not as I do.

Peter: But people do as they do. ‘Cause that’s how we’re programmed.

Jesse: There’s another facet of this that’s related to the culture of leadership and the cultures that leaders establish for their organizations through what they model. You mentioned that you report into an engineering organization. In most contexts, I would say that if I heard from a design leader who was reporting into an engineering organization, I would assume a certain set of cultural difficulties that would come along with thatm of the differences between the way that an engineering organization wants to manage its work and the way that design work wants to be managed, and potentially really conflicting values on the part of a design leader versus an engineering leader in terms of how they make decisions, how they orchestrate the work of their teams, how they communicate.

All of those kinds of things. 

So I wonder what advice you might have for other people who find themselves as design leaders reporting into engineering organizations, for how to manage that relationship effectively. What do you think makes for an effective partnership when design is situated within an engineering culture?

Sally: For me, it really comes down to the leader. So Chester, my boss, has worked with designers before. I feel like on a deep level he groks what I’m here to do. And there’s just so much trust there. 

I’ve learned so much from him talking about modeling and leadership. He’s got such a learner’s mindset. He really listens deeply. He’s open to learning. He will always offer his perspective, but he granted me that autonomy and gave me the space and time that I needed to prove what I was trying to do and to build that credibility. So I think if you’re going to sit within eng, it’s really important to have the right leader as your head of eng. 

Some of the benefits of being in eng, is eng tends to get budget for headcount, so that’s kinda nice. And in the early days, as we were just getting started with my team, we really did want to be in lockstep with eng because they were shipping really frequently. So we wanted to really embed with them, co-create with them. And it was helpful organizationally, so much came for free, was sitting in the same place within the organization, so much communication, there was no silo. 

Then, as we built out research, then the opportunity became, Now, how do you make sure you’re also partnering in a really strong way with product management, as we kind of became more mature, became more strategic. But in those early days, when we were a little bit more delivery/execution focused, sitting within eng, was very helpful. And it hasn’t really been an impediment to us since in large part because of Chester, because of my leader.

Peter: You said you had the autonomy to run your team, as you see fit, regardless of who your leader is.

Sally: That’s right. I’m not expected to run it as though it were an eng team, which is helpful, yeah. So, we were able to demonstrate a different way of working.

Peter: It sounds like when you joined Duo, in terms of things like culture, leadership, you hit a jackpot as a new design leader in an organization where a lot of the challenges that other design leaders face in other organizations just weren’t there.

I’m wondering, though, how, if at all, that changed with the Cisco acquisition. ‘Cause now there’s a whole set of relationships that you didn’t have before, new people that you’re interacting with. How have you had to shift or change how you relate up and out, now that you’re within this much broader context?

Sally: Yeah, I guess the fundamentals are still the same, which is: build relationships, identify who your key partners need to be, and just spend the time to build that trusting partnership. And, I’m happy to say, I haven’t really encountered much in the way of politics at Cisco, which is pretty extraordinary.

‘Cause it’s a huge company. But honestly, like, I’m still learning my way. I’m still finding my way. It’s a massive org and it’s a new set of skills I’m currently developing. How do you seek and gain alignment across a broader organization where you’re not necessarily directing those resources? That’s an interesting pickle.

Peter: So what are some steps that you’re taking to realize that?

Sally: Hm, I think Duo does have a lot of credibility within Cisco. And so using our organization as a model is one. Again, same playbook, build out those case studies and socialize them to demonstrate what we do and credibility, and then really invest in one-on-one relationships with your key partners, just spending time understanding what are their needs, what’s challenging them. That’s been foundational for me. I’m sure if we talk again in a year, I’ll have new stuff.

There is something else on burnout. Can I take us back to burnout for a second? Okay.  ‘Cause I’m again, selfishly, I’m curious to hear what you all have to say. 

Peter: And clearly this is something you’re dealing with. I don’t know why in a pandemic, you would be considering burnout.

Sally: …the smoke-filled air. Yeah. 

Peter: That’s right.

Sally: Yeah, the other flavor of burnout. So there’s the overwork burnout that I’ve certainly experienced at times. And then the other flavor, I suspect particularly as a design leader, is like a creative malaise where part of it is, how do you continue to maintain a creative practice that rejuvenates you so that you can bring your energy and your spirit into leadership? I find that there’s ebbs and flows of feeling lit up creatively, and there’s a form of burnout for me that I encounter sometimes where I’m not particularly inspired. I know I will come out of it because it’s cyclical, but it’s something like a creative malaise and it’s a real bummer when it hits.

And I always know it will resolve itself, but it’s inevitable phase that I have to go through. And it’s always a bummer when it happens. Do you all have that?

Jesse: I think, to your point, I have that less when I have creative work to do, and, as a design leader, your access to creative work is highly variable, and in some cases might be more or less nonexistent for very long stretches of time,  before you ever get to offer a creative opinion, you know, move a thing around on a screen, any of that stuff.

And I think that you touched on something really important, which is that we think of burnout in general in terms of overwork, that if you’re starting to feel burned out, the thing to do is to do less, but, in fact, what it might be is that you’re just not doing the right things, that you’re not doing things that actually fill you up.

That, in fact, what you might need is a little bit less of whatever you’re considering your wind-down time, because it’s not actually replenishing you and you need to go get a hobby.

Sally: Yeah. Yeah. Like I really rely on just taking walks in the middle of the day, so it’s really regenerative for me to take a quick walk outside at least once a day, if not a few times, if I have a little pocket of time. 

Peter: Also following on Jesse’s response, how creative are you in your work these days? You’re running a 30-person organization, product design and research, maybe… do you have content or other functions in your team as well?

Sally: Yeah, we brought in UX writing, UX eng, some design systems, design ops types. 

Peter: Right. So you’ve got a team of 30. And, when I think about people in your role, I think of four sets of activities they’re doing: there’s creative leadership, managerial leadership, operational leadership and I’ve added a fourth. I used to just have those three, I’ve added a fourth, which is this executive leadership, kind of strategic. It’s related to creative, but it’s different, ‘cause you’re setting direction in some ways, or having certain kinds of relationships or conversations. 

And I think a challenge that a lot of design leaders in your position face is, as Jesse pointed out, you’re not doing the creative work, and I’m wondering if that’s been true for you, how you’ve maintained access to the creative work, or if you’ve elected to delegate much of that. When you do do creative work, how do you know where to focus your creative time and your creative energy? What’s your relationship to creativity within your team? ‘Cause I’m sure it’s not what it was when you were two to five people.

Sally: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really different. Now, when we were two to five and maybe up to 15, there would be a Brew:30, Friday afternoons at 4:30. The whole company would get together for happy hour and tap the keg. And it was an extrovert’s dream and all my little tiny baby designers and me who skew more introverted would go hide in our usability testing room and do a quiet drawing hour, where we’d, like, listen to a podcast and not talk, and draw together.

And it was the cutest and it was so fun. And outside there was the hum of people talking to one another and that was kinda nice, like that added to the ambience. But I love that quietly stealing away into our little lab and just drawing quietly together. That was really sweet. 

These days, as you run through those four pillars, flavors, of leadership, the operational, managerial, I’m naturally drawn less to that.

I’m more drawn to the creative and now executive strategy stuff. I have to be really careful though, because with a team of this size, what I don’t want to do is the swoop and poop, where I’m over here doing my executive stuff, and then suddenly I come and mess with people.

You know, people do design reviews with me and I give feedback. And the feedback that I try to give is typically not as much around fit and finish. It’s more around, “Oh, they’re not aware that there’s this whole other thing happening with product over here. But if they were able to find a way to weave that together, we could do more with what they’re working on right now. So let me make sure that they’re aware of that they have the right connections, they’re having the right conversations.” 

It’s sort of like being a cross-pollinator, being a bridge, doing that organizational wayfinding and having the super high-level context for what’s happening and bringing that into the detailed-level design work.

Where I do get involved, I do try to be kind of unapologetically opinionated about anything we design that’s gonna be for the end-user. So we’re a B-to-B company. We sell into the enterprise and we have a couple of key personas and one is like an IT administrator who’s going to deploy and manage Duo, but then he’s going to deploy as a company, and all of his employees have to use Duo as a two-factor authentication device to login to their work. So that’s sort of like the B to B to C in a way, like we are designing for the consumer. We’re selling into the enterprise.

I have a background in consumer web, so I spend a lot of time bringing that consumer web lens to enterprise security, which is kind of cool. And my theory,  my belief, is, if we can make the end-user successful, and make that a really great, super friction-free, experience, the value builds up.

It makes the IT administrator successful. It makes the buyer successful. The Chief Information Security Officer successful. So what we’re trying to do is shape good security behaviors, it’s a gross term, but in the security space, they call it security, hygiene, you know, good, security hygiene make that end user successful.

And that’s where I spend a lot of my attention and time to make sure that’s right.

Peter: That sounds like a conscious choice that you’ve made in terms of where you’re devoting that creative energy.

Sally: Yeah. And part of it is because those people have not opted into Duo. Duo has been foisted upon them, and I’m thinking, too, that your first encounter with Duo might be as a part of onboarding into a brand new job, you know? So you’re so inundated with new stuff when you start a new job, and Duo is one of a couple dozen things that you get introduced to you on your first day of onboarding into a new job. So understanding that as a context, as opposed to the buyer or the IT administrator, who’s done the research, done a little bit of competitive analysis, and has decided to choose Duo to deploy at their company.

So I’m really focused on the person who didn’t opt into this experience and making it great for them.

Peter: You mentioned less interest in the more management and operational aspects of your role. In my experience, those are the things, though, that, you know, keep the engine humming, keep the lights on, and if they’re not attended to, the organization starts kind of falling apart. How have you accommodated your less interest in those functions?

Is that one of those things where you just occasionally suck it up and like, “Okay. Today is my operational day and I’m just gonna kind of power through that.” Or strategies have you adopted to make sure that that’s getting attended to.

Sally: Yeah, I think one is, I’ve just built the self-awareness that those just don’t tend to be things that give me energy. They deplete my energy, but I can do them. And then, finding great leaders and great people who I trust that I can delegate work to who tend to thrive doing that type of work.

Like, that’s the magic is when you find the peanut butter to your jelly, right? Like someone who’s like, “I love doing the ops stuff. That’s my jam. This is what gives me life.” And then it’s a win-win, you know, it’s like every time there’s taxes and I’m like, I can’t believe there’re CPAs and they love doing this.

It’s so great. What a gift to humanity, these people. But yeah, they exist, and finding people who are great, almost like when you hear about CEO/COO partnerships and like the role of the COO is so varied and it’s so much depends on essentially, like, the psychographic profile of the CEO. They need to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Jesse: And this is part of why I always advise leaders to tune into what they need for themselves, rather than trying to model the structure of their leadership on what somebody else created for themselves. Because, you know, your strengths are different. The complements that are going to support you are going to be different. 

So one of the themes I feel like throughout this conversation, has been the need to continue to be flexible in the face of ongoing change. And as we’re winding up here, I am curious about what changes you see around the corner? Is there a process of change that you’re in the middle of right now that you’re looking forward to seeing through?

Sally: Hmm, that’s good. Yeah. I’m in a reflective place right now and I am reflecting quite a lot on… I’m so proud of the work that we’ve done as a team, as a company, I’m really proud of the value that we’re creating in the world. Honestly, it’s such a joy to deeply believe that if more people buy the stuff that we make, the Silicon Valley cliche is, like, “make the world a better place.” 

It really does. We help with election security. We help with critical infrastructure. We help the trains run on time. It’s that part that is so cool. And I’m so proud that a design team can have positive impacts on the safety and trust that people feel when they use the internet. Like that is so cool. 

Earlier this year, before the pandemic set in, I was pushing myself to explore what it means to savor. And that was, like, a new thing for me. I’m feeling proud, I’m still working, I’m not disengaging from the work, but what does it mean to really savor a big accomplishment that I feel proud of? And, now I’m just reflecting forward on, What is the next chapter? I don’t know. It’s neat to talk to you all right now, because I do feel like I’m in a moment of trying to spend time to understand what that could and should mean for me.

Peter: You were referring to some of the societal context that we find ourselves in, and clearly this, this year has been a…

Sally: A Whopper. 

Peter: A difficult one. And I’m wondering how that has interceded into your and your team’s work lives, or do you try to keep a little wall around your team, and there’s work time and not-work time. Like, for eight hours, let’s focus on this and then, and then not, as opposed to, oftentimes, work and non work-life bleed together. How has that manifested within you and your team and how have you approached that?

Sally: I try to be really honest with what I’m struggling with right now, you know, so if I’m having a one-on-one conversation, I try to be really honest about what’s tough right now as an offer of vulnerability. If they feel the need to share, I want to make sure they feel like they can share with me in a way that’s safe.

I don’t want to dump on my team and create more stress for them, but I just want to show up as a real, fully-formed human, and, especially because the lines between personal and work life have blurred, if not completely dissolved for a lot of us, and then also trying to remember to bring some joy back. 

The thing I did yesterday morning was I spent some time over the weekend playing with gouache, and I hadn’t done that in quite awhile. It’s like a more opaque, watercolor-type of paint. So, if you enjoy pushing color around on paper, gouache is a lot of fun, and I’m just playing with it and getting to know it.

And so I just posted that on our team Slack Monday morning, just to remind them, we’re all creative people, and what are you doing to maintain your own creative practice? I try to share a bit of my personal life just to give them permission, if this is something that you would find to be restorative, even in the middle of your workday, giving them permission to do it.

When we’re not having fires, if I step away for a 10-minute walk, I’ll post that to the group Slack and say, “Hey, I just need to take a bit to recharge. And I’m going to go for a little walk.” And it’s not important that they know I’m walking. It’s more about modeling and give them permission to do what they need to do to take care of themselves too.

‘Cause that’s so important to me. One of the joys of leadership is getting to have these long-term form relationships with folks that extend beyond the time that you spend managing them. What a joy it is to see someone in the first few years of their career, and then even after they leave your company, getting to see what they do, and they check in with you, and seeing where they go from there.

Peter: I think that was a remarkably, positive, affirming note to wrap this discussion on, so, at least for me, thank you, Sally. Thank you for taking the time. It was great having you and I don’t want to speak for Jesse.

I actually, because I actually have to bounce. 

Jesse: (joking) I had a terrible time.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. 

Peter: And that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, you can find Jesse and I on Twitter. I’m @peterme he’s @jjg. You can also find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/, where you can find past episodes with complete transcripts, as well as a contact form. We read everything that comes through there. It’s a great place to send any comments or questions that you have about the show, anything you’d like to hear us talk about in future episodes and with that, thank you for your attention and as always keep on finding your way.

In which Jesse and Peter dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change.

Peter: Oh, shit. Design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and, caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design.

Peter: I’m Peter Merholz,

Jesse: And I am Jesse James Garrett…

Together: …and we are Finding Our Way…

Peter: …Navigating the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership.   

Jesse: On today’s show Peter and I dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change.

Peter: One of the things that I think is interesting that I’ve seen more of during our break is a legit establishment of this design leadership role that doesn’t assume management.  So, one of the companies I’m working for, a big bank, is hiring up to 20 people who are true senior design leaders. They would be senior manager or director level, but with no expectation of management and direct reports. They are organizational leaders, they are creative leaders, they are strategic leaders. They are there in large part because those folks who do manage are so overwhelmed with their relationship responsibilities, that they need support from folks who can focus on the work.

I’m seeing it more and more, and I’m hearing from other design leaders that I’m talking to a desire to establish that role within their organizations. It’s almost like, wait, can we do that? We can have someone who’s really senior, but not manages people? Will they allow that to happen? And it’s like, yeah, if you want it.

Jesse: Well, it depends on where you are, and it depends on cultural context that you’re in because, in a lot of cases, one of the challenges with the senior individual contributor is, How do you measure the impact that they’re having beyond the work that they’re delivering? How do you measure the leadership dimension of what that person does so that the organization can know if they’ve got the right people in those senior roles?

Peter: How would you measure that if they had direct reports?

Jesse: Well, if they had direct reports, then you’ve got a broader set of data to consider in terms of the contribution that the individual is making and the success that they’re finding in the organization. It becomes about team cohesion, team success, team delivery kinds of metrics.

Peter: You measure these senior IC leaders similarly, it’s just the team doesn’t report to them. So way this is structured, and I think this is why we’re starting to see this more and more, management is functional, you’ll have design managers managing designers, and design directors managing design managers, and often not just functional within design, but like research managers managing researchers, and content strategy managers managing content strategists. This individual contributor design leadership role is a principal designer role, and s leading a team that is cross-functional within design. So there will be product designers, researchers, content strategists. 

So it’s around leading the work, not leading, not managing the resource to put it another way. And then additionally, as they get more senior, they’re very active in leading cross-functionally. So they’re not necessarily directing product people and engineers, but definitely influencing them.

And in terms of accountability, these folks are ultimately held accountable for the output of the teams that they are directing.

Jesse: So tell me about how formal authority works in these situations because what happens generally is that authority tends to hew pretty closely to reporting structures.

Peter: You’re seeing that less and less, I think, in these product development organizations where reporting is functional, but delivery is cross-functional. This is becoming an accepted just way of being. So a design director has less creative authority than the design lead within a cross functional team often, right, because the design lead in a cross functional team, working with the product manager and engineer, is making the design decisions at that level of delivery. And that is where the authority thus resides.

Jesse: Yeah. If you don’t have the ability to actively direct the work of a designer, if it is, as you describe, influence, then how do you assess how much influence you have had?

Peter: It depends on where you locate creative authority within these structures. So you can imagine at the simplest level, you have two structures: you have your reporting structure of design and engineering and product reporting up through their functions; and then you have the work structure, which is cross-functional teams. Think of that as squads, pods, whatever, where you have a mix of product managers, designers, engineers, working together. 

Now in some organizations, they are using that work structure as the management structure. But I’m frankly seeing that less and less. What I’m seeing more and more of is a recognition that we should organize reporting structures by function, because there’s value there: Professional development, recruiting and hiring, there’s value in making it clear how you grow within your function. 

But the work is being organized in these cross functional teams, which have their own structure. 

When I’ve worked in marketplace models, you’ll have a team dedicated to the sell side of the marketplace and a team dedicated to the buy side of the marketplace. and those become these work structures. And so the creative authority resides on the work side, not on the reporting side.

Design directors aren’t coming over necessarily to the work side. They are seen primarily as organizational minders, because there’s plenty of work to do recruiting and hiring, professional development, and one-on-ones, and all that kind of stuff. 

But you still need creative leaders. There can be a different authority structure specific to the work from a reporting structure. And so these super-senior ICs might report to a design director, but they lead a set of work in the work structure.

Jesse: Who looks after design as a practice in this model?

Peter: Oftentimes those leaders will also be practice leads. 

So you’ll have your content strategists or UX writers reporting to a manager of content strategy, possibly reporting to a director of content strategy. Director and manager of content strategy own the practice and the reporting relationships. The issue that arises is: I’m a director of product design. And I have product design leads, who report to me who are in the workstream leading work.

They are the creative authority for work in their area. What is my job as a creative authority as a director of product design?

And my take on it is that the practice leads—director of product design, director of content strategy, director of user research—they establish a framework for quality. So they create the shared understanding of what quality is. The people doing the work are then expected to deliver at those levels of quality.

Jesse: And who evaluates that?

Peter: So evaluation becomes an interesting question, because in my worldview, and this goes back to our work at Adaptive Path, that creative lead needs to be the sole authority over what gets launched. 

That director of product design might look at what that lead product designer’s putting out there and saying, “That’s not living up to our quality standards.” There’s a disjuncture here. In the moment, the director of product design, and unless it is truly egregious and they want to pull the emergency cord, doesn’t really have the authority to stop that work in the construct that I’m putting out there. If the lead in the moment is like, “No, this is what solving the problem. We’re going to launch it.” 

Then, if there is a disconnect between an established understanding of quality and what is actually getting shipped under a particular lead product designer, Then there’s a conversation about what’s going on there. Often, what you find going on there is that there are a lot of conditions within that cross-functional team that inhibit that designer’s ability to deliver at the level of quality that the practice lead has established. So then it becomes this other challenge of, “Do we need to encourage new organizational practices to enable us to achieve the level of quality that we are establishing?”

Jesse: Right, right. This is a thing that I’ve seen organizations struggle with figuring out, where that line is, how involved the senior most leader is in looking at the details of the creative work being produced by the leads underneath them.

And how do they influence practice and process based on that, because a lot of what you’re talking about is stuff that emerges out of the negotiations across a cross-functional team, as they are figuring out how to balance all the considerations in order to deliver. This role, as you’re describing it, that has responsibility for those practices and processes is also pretty far removed from them, and is also really just kind of seeing things after the fact. What I’ve seen is that that loop never gets closed. Energy and attention of the senior-most leader is so focused on things like budget and resources and things like that, that they don’t have the space to be able to actually take stewardship, take ownership of design as a practice in these organizations.

Peter: That is definitely an issue, especially as these organizations scale. 

But, that’s where Design Operations plays a part. 

I was actually just talking with one of the heads of product design that I work with. He has a team 80 or so, and he’s been able to get himself, right now and for the next month or so, where two days a week he’s doing what you would expect a design leader to do: going to meetings, one-on-ones, recruiting, hiring, that kind of stuff. 

The other three days a week, he’s working with a small team, small cross-functional team, on building out a vision, a product vision, a North-Star type work for the company. And he recognizes it’s temporary, right? It’s time boxed. This couldn’t be his job forever because he does need to get back to it. But he’s able, for a while, to only do two days a week doing what people consider his job-job. So he can spend three days a week being the creative leader that no one else can be in this organization.

And one of the reasons he can do it is he delegated all of his budgetary activity to his head of design ops. Just, like, “You own it. You do it. If you need me to check in, provide direction, give you guidance, whatever, happy to. It’s my org, so I care about this stuff, but literally you are going to all those meetings with the finance people. You are in charge of that now.” 

And so I think we don’t do enough to decompose the responsibilities of design leaders, and really recognize all the things that they need to be doing, and, What are those things that really the design leadership should be focused on? And what are the things that they can delegate or put off their plate? 

That’s why DesignOps is emerging, is this recognition that design leaders were spending all their time operating and none of their time leading design. But now this other thing is happening is, “Okay. So we’re delegating design operations, oh, shit, design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design. So how do we shift those activities and responsibilities among a set of leaders so that everyone can deliver well on some aspect of this, instead of one person, half-assing a whole bunch of things.

Jesse: Right. Right.

Peter: And I hear you in terms of we’re not caught up there. And so loops don’t get closed. People are far away from the work and that’s still a problem to solve.

Jesse: It takes a village to lead design, right?

Peter: Essentially. Yeah. And I think we recognized this 20 years ago in engineering, you’ve had a VP role of engineering, which tended to be the org minder. You had your CTO or architect roles that tended to be what we would consider creative leads or technology leads, the ones figuring out how to solve the problems, the technical problems.

So there was that bifurcation happened a long time ago. You had technical program management, is this other function that was then essentially there to support engineering. With the agile revolution, you have agile coaches and scrum masters and all these other people figuring out how to keep the work engine humming.

So there had already been this recognition of all these different things that need to get done and a decomposition of activities across roles to enable that to get done, and design is just behind. ‘Cause it’s taken us longer to get to a similar scale. 

Music break 1

Jesse: Part of this really has to do with the culture of leadership within the larger organization that you’re a part of, especially how collaborative, how consensus-driven, how consultative the decision-making culture of the organization is, because in an organization that broadly asks its leaders to take a more command-and-control kind of stance, approaching leadership in this way can be really challenging, because even if it feels, to the design leader, like there is a better way to do this, that is more hands off, that distributes power and authority at a lower level in the organization more effectively, they may be contending with a larger culture that looks at what they’re doing, and it looks to them like they’re fucking it up because they’re not leading according to the model that the rest of the entire organization, including the CEO, potentially leads.

Peter: Totally. What’s interesting to me– the problem I’ve seen is actually the inverse, where the cultural direction was more bottom-up. It was autonomous product teams. Do whatever you want. The output is crappy, for any number of reasons: it’s not coordinated across these teams, plus there’s not a shared understanding of what quality looks like. And, in this one instance when leadership would review the work of these teams and say, “It’s not good enough, don’t ship it,” these teams would ship it anyway. And there was no accountability.

There was no… 

Jesse: …that loop closing. Yeah. Right. 

Peter: Some organizations could stand to have a little more top-down, command-and-control, to drive quality. 

What’s happened in this organization, is they’re at some stage in their cycle where they need a shock to the system to improve quality, and that shock is not going to come from the bottom-up. It’s too fractured. The amount of effort it would take to kind of dial up all these individual teams would be too great. 

But one of the benefits of hierarchies, when you can wield them appropriately, is to do a hopefully positive shock from the top-down and say, “No, that’s not appropriate. Here’s some new standards of quality. And if your work is not measuring up to these handed-down standards of quality, then it is not shipping,  and we need to take this approach because the problem is so severe that we need to almost explicitly work in a way that we don’t want to work, work to overcome this issue in an effort to reset.”

Try to get a new normal understood within the organization so that after you do this top-down, command-and-control for a while, there’s the understanding, the awareness, the appreciation of that built so that you can then pull back and have some faith that the teams will continue to deliver it, that new level of quality. 

So I, I almost, I long for command and control. Which goes against my, a lot of my philosophy as I was saying earlier, the authority has to be given to the person who has accountability for delivery. And that’s usually someone at that level of a product team, shipping stuff.

Jesse: So, typically, that locus of power either resides with the creative lead for the particular piece of work as you’re describing, or the person who is that person’s manager, that person’s performance manager. And this third element that you’re talking about, this senior-level individual contributor without

performance management responsibilities,feels like this extra thing in these organizations that they’re trying to figure out. How this third center of authority fits in with these other two. And organizations are struggling to give it teeth because the larger organizations are looking at design teams alongside their technology teams and the various other teams that are responsible for delivering all of the functions of the business, and trying to figure out how to make the design team look more like their other teams as much as they can, to simplify their management of a complex cross-functional ecosystem.

Peter: In the case of this one company, they have an engineering team that actually is serving as a positive model. 

What I’m sensing based on this conversation is what we’re all part of, is there is a shift occurring from whatever was standard, let’s say 20 years ago, that I think was much more like you were saying: a lot more command-and-control, the reporting organization was also the delivery organization. Your manager was responsible for your performance and your output, and their manager was responsible, and, and it was cleaner in some way.

And then what happened essentially, is this recognition of, in the 21st century, to succeed in doing work requires cross-functional teams. You cannot go inside an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of a truly cross-functional team. We’re talking design and engineering and product management and data science and marketing, like true cross-functional teams. And the model before was you didn’t collaborate cross-functionally, you did your work and then you handed it off to the next function, and you handed it off to the next function. And so that, it’s not even waterfall model so much as this kind of yeah, the production line model.

It doesn’t work when you’re trying to be nimble, responsive. When you’re working in a world of software as a service and, you’re constantly shipping and all that kind of stuff. And so they’ve moved to this cross-functional team where you have representatives of those functions present at all times.

We still don’t quite know how to manage complex cross-functional delivery. We know how to manage functional organizations. Certain aspects are still being managed functionally—your professional development and, and your, performance reviews and the skills growth and all that kind of stuff

We don’t have clear, well-understood models of how you manage cross functional teams, particularly at scale. 

To take what you said moving forward: I just think we’re not there yet. There is not an answer. We’re still figuring it out.

And what I think we’re seeing is that issue, the challenge, conflict, that soreness that is happening with design leaders is because we’re trying to manage cross-functional work teams akin to how we managed perhaps in the past, these hierarchical teams and it’s not quite working.

And so now we’re trying, let’s go the other direction and it’s all autonomous and every team’s on its own and that’s not working. And we’re stumbling toward what is a model that allows functions to work well together as teams at scale. And no one has really solved that in a clear, repeatable way that people can feel pretty good about.

Jesse: It’s interesting that you keep referring back to development methodologies, in that I think that for most of my career, if not all of my career, the conventional wisdom among designers would have been that you should not attempt to manage design the way that you manage engineering, that engineering management practices are too factory floor production line oriented.

They don’t have enough flex or space in them for the creative exploration that’s necessary for design. That design as a practice was fundamentally incompatible with the way that technical development gets managed. And it feels like you’re saying that if that was true, that maybe is not as true anymore, or even perhaps that the folks who have been doing this work to define these approaches to technical development have lapped us basically, and gotten out in front on these issues of how to get multiple functions actually integrated together effectively, which is really different from, frankly, most of what I’ve heard from most designers for most of my career.

Peter: So they’ve lapped us. I wouldn’t say that they’ve solved it though. If you ever hear of a designer embedded in a product team, squad, scrum, et cetera, that is a model created for engineering delivery. And, it is not a model that leads to good design, but they got out in front of us.

They’ve been dealing with these problems longer because engineering orgs tend to be bigger. The value of engineering was more evident to internal leaders. And so they built out engineering orgs sooner.  But these, what are meant to be cross-functional, organizational frameworks definitely skewed towards  supporting engineering over the other functions. That’s actually one of the reasons we wrote the book, was I saw this occurring and I was frustrated because you are right. Design works best in its own way, not by adopting engineering processes. But when design got subsumed into these, what were supposed to be cross-functional, team structures, that were really about how do we help engineering be as effective as it can be, and to heck with anyone else,   design suffered in that regard.

People often forget that much of what we think of as agile is simply a way for engineers to to assert the authority over their work, because it had gotten away from them. They were being told by managers, who didn’t actually understand what it took to deliver, what to do. And the engineers were like, no, we’re taking the reins back. Right? It was their own form of, frankly, a kind of quasi-Marxist maneuver. What’s happened, though, is designers haven’t yet done that themselves. Designers haven’t taken those reins.

Music break 2

Jesse: All of this makes me very curious about the work that was done by technology leaders, you know, 15 years ago to start pushing the

process and organizational change in these organizations, away from the way that software had traditionally been made up to that point. And how they were able to make the argument for such a radically different style to their leadership.  Because, frankly, that is one of the things that we as designers and as design leaders have had the hardest time doing, is simply convincing our leaders that there is a different way to do things and we should be given the permission to try.

Peter: Part of their ability to make that change is the phrase, “Double the work in half the time.” And what CEO isn’t going to like pause for a second. 

Jesse: “Tell me more,” 

Peter: “Yeah. I want some of that.” 

I think the challenge, I hadn’t thought about it this way, but it kind of goes back to what you were saying about the difference earlier, but just between engineering practices and design practices, engineering is measured on productivity and how they define quality, which is uptime, no bugs, stability, performance. All very mechanized outputs. 

Engineering is not held accountable for business success. Engineering is not held accountable for customer engagement. Engineering is not held accountable for all those fuzzier, squishier impacts on users and customers. Engineering is held accountable for, Are our machines able to do what we want the machines to do?

If all you want from design is more design, then, yes, you can put design in a similar context and you will get more design, but that’s, yeah, it’s laughable ‘cause it’s meaningless and, there’s just this fundamental difference in the paradigm of what the value is that design delivers and the value is that engineering delivers.

Jesse: And I think it comes back to how that value is communicated to and understood by the senior business leadership.

Peter: I thought tou were going to say, “Senior bean counters.”

Jesse: That, yes, those, too. So, as you describe the agile transformation, it sounds like those people were able to speak to value in a way that their nontechnical leaders could understand, right? You didn’t have to understand the ins and outs of technical development processes in order to be able to understand the value of “double the work in half the time.”

And we don’t even have ways to talk about the value that we’re delivering now, nevermind talking about increasing that value in the future. They already had a reference point for engineering when agile came onto the scene. They had ways of evaluating. They were maybe not the best ways, but they had ways of evaluating that were needles that they could see would be moved by a move to a different approach.

And they don’t have that for us. They don’t have needles that they can look at and go, well, this, and this, and this will obviously change if this works the way that you guys say it will.

Peter: They do and they don’t. Unfortunately the needles they have for us are productivity needles. That’s why I think much of design as it has scaled has also been reduced to output. My question or my, my wonderment based on what you’re saying is, nor do they have metrics to justify more product management, but they invest in it.

Jesse: Okay. So what’s that about?

Peter: That’s a good question. I think about this.. I found myself thinking about it again more recently. I find myself wondering why companies keep hiring product managers. They love hiring product managers, but what ends up happening is from a ratio standpoint, you get these ratios out of whack, where you get multiple product managers for a single designer.

And I’m like, “Why do companies keep hiring product managers when they don’t have the team to deliver what the product manager is working on?” And I think the reason they keep hiring product managers is that product management is a promise of future value. 

Jesse: And design is not even that, is it?

Peter: It’s not recognized as that. We know it is, but it’s not recognized as that. So, by hiring a product manager, you believe you are enabling the ability to deliver more product, new product. And with that delivery of more, a new product, the generation of increased value. So, you hire product managers because for every product manager, we can launch another feature and another feature.

For some reason, what’s not fully understood or appreciated is when you have product managers, the job of a product manager is to make work for other people.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: And so you have all these product managers generating work, but if you’re not also hiring engineers and designers and others at a similar clip, what ends up happening is, and I’ve seen this, I’ve been in environments where product managers almost literally are walking the halls with requirements, looking for someone to execute on them, just like, “Do you have time? Can you, can you help me build this thing?”

And now everybody else is somehow pulled into this person’s insanity. It leads to all these problems. That said, thinking about what you were saying in terms of design and the ability to cleanly and clearly value design, design’s value is

essentially the same as product management value. When you want to look at it from a business lens, designers help you with acquiring new customers, help you with retaining customers, help you engage customers, help you potentially get those customers to spend more while they are engaged. So, you know, unlocking more revenue or whatever, right?

Those are all metrics that a business cares about. That doesn’t take a lot of imagination to connect a designer’s work to those metrics. Those metrics though, tend to be owned by product, but product doesn’t actually deliver on those metrics or do anything to make those metrics happen.

Usually they rely on their teams. And their job is to coordinate the efforts of those teams towards those business goals. As we said, though, the engineers, their metrics aren’t really product metrics. Engineers’ metrics are engineering metrics with this assumption that, I guess, a magic in the system, that if the engineers focusing on their metrics keep machines running and product is focusing on their metrics and value creation, then it’ll all work out. 

Now, this is a thought I hadn’t had before. And I think that the hidden connection that hadn’t been realized was the designer is the person who turns that engineering quality into value realized by the product manager.

Jesse: And is cut out of the equation altogether themselves.

It feels like there is, is a lack of things for designers to uniquely own that have value beyond the aesthetic, beyond the subjective.

Peter: That is basically true. There is no meaningful design metric that isn’t also a product metric.

You’re making me want to look up a tweet. Hopefully it won’t take long. 

On February 23rd, 2020, Jared Spool wrote, “I’m of the belief that in a few years, product management and UX design leadership will be indistinguishable. In some orgs they already are.”  And that, I think, speaks to what we’re talking about. 

Jesse: Yeah. I think most of the time, if you look at two different functions in the organization and they are impacting the same metrics, that seems like a pretty good argument that those functions should be combined in some way. You know, maybe design is an adjunct to product management, maybe there is a space for a design practice that is more fully integrated with product management as a way of sort of borrowing that understanding of value and being able to transfer that to the design work. Should designers be reporting to product managers?

Peter: Product managers. Hmmm, no. At least not the way that it is typically practiced in most organizations. I think this is another area, as the tweet suggests, we’re seeing change and evolution. 

There’s no reason that that product manager can’t be a designer or could not have once been aa designer. And we’re seeing that all throughout the industry, more and more designers are turning into product managers. It’s still the vast minority, but we’re seeing a greater and greater acceptance of designer as product manager, as opposed to historically it was MBA as product manager or

engineering lead as product manager. We’re now seeing companies realize like, oh, the product is this thing that people use. Maybe the person who’s managing the product should have a ability to understand that use.

Jesse: I have been advocating for at least 10 years now that designers who actually want more authority, want more power, need to move toward product management. They can do product management from a design sort of stance. I don’t think it means leaving behind that creative influence. And in fact, I feel like there is something missing in the practice of product management, as I’ve seen it, that designers bring, which is this holistic experiential sense. That is not something that I’ve seen a part of how product managers do their jobs. 

Peter: Right. No, that’s and, that is, I think, largely true. It is changing, but still largely true. It was probably about 15 years ago that you created a talk called The Experience is the Product. Which I don’t think we realized at the time what we were saying. Organizationally, we were just commenting on what we saw in the world, and that instead of focusing on products as these one-offs, we wanted to encourage people to think about a broader experience context in which these products sat. 

I have a 2020 version of that talk still called The Experience is the Product, which makes much more explicit that connection between user experience of the word experience, and product management of the word product and that user experience and product management are essentially the same thing.

Music Break 

Peter: One of the companies I’m working with has come to a realization that the quality of the product that they are delivering is subpar. A few years ago, they brought on a very senior design leader who came in, was given a mandate, looked around, was like, “This isn’t great. I gotta do a lot of stuff. I got to fix this,” and wasn’t able to get traction. Wasn’t able to make kind of change happen that they realized needed to happen. And three years later, this team is still producing crap. As I started digging around, I found out that there had also been, within the last couple of years, a new head of product management and a new head of product marketing hired, who similarly came in, looked around, said, “Oh, I gotta make some changes.” And realized much greater success in making changes in their part of the organization. 

So, my initial concern was that it was some type of broadly cultural thing, but no, this new head of product was able to do a real reorg, make some real changes. Their new head of product marketing basically changed how they do product marketing, like the processes by which they operated. And I was like, “Why is it that this new senior design leader wasn’t able to realize their vision, the way that this person’s peers did?” And as I unpacked it, I found out that this new design leader, their leaders didn’t have their back the same way that the product management and product marketing leaders basically ran cover for these new leaders that they brought in. 

So when the new product leader or the new product marketing leader is making these changes and ruffling feathers and pissing people off, and the message is going back to their boss, “What’s what’s going on here? So, and so’s doing all this stuff. This is new, it’s different. It’s not right.” Those leaders were like, “You know what? That person’s in charge. If this is what they think needs to happen,  they have my full support.” in this design context, when that happened, those super senior design leaders told this new design leader, “Hey, Hey, you need to back off a bit. You’re upsetting people. You’re not doing it the way we work here.” 

And what it pointed out to me is, however senior you are as a leader, you need another leader to support you in the change that you are trying to make.

We tend to think that leaders are almost operating on an island or like if they have a strong enough vision they can just carry people forward. 

And in reality, leaders need leaders to protect and cover and enable and support them. And it’s not something I had been as cognizant of, until seeing this side-by-side compare-and-contrast of a leader who’s been given that cover and the change they were able to make, and a leader not given that cover and them getting stonewalled.

And now years later, I’m hearing that this leader maybe isn’t delivering up to what would be expected. And it’s like, “Yeah, because they weren’t given the support they needed when, they were like, ‘Hey, we should do these things.’”

Jesse: You didn’t let them optimize the environment for their own success… 

Peter: Yeah, yeah…

Jesse: …so don’t be surprised when they’re not successful. Yeah. Yeah. And, this goes back a little bit to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, about the early days of agile and how those folks made the case for that change in those organizations.

And it did eventually take somebody up top who didn’t understand the deeper implications, who didn’t understand the reasons for all of the changes, say, “I don’t care that I don’t understand it. I believe in you. And I believe in what you’re doing and I believe you’re the right person to orchestrate this.”

And that I think is a level of credibility and trust that engineering leaders had circa 2005 as they were starting to push agile as process change, as cultural change, in these organizations, that designers haven’t gotten to yet. And in fact, product managers have stepped in and they’ve already got more power than we’ve got and they just showed up.

Peter: Yeah, I think it ties back to what we talked quite a while ago about trust and about relationships. And I think a lot of design leaders don’t know how important it is to manage up and manage those relationships well, in order to then manage down to get what you want.

They come in, look around, they see the problem. They feel it must be evident to everybody and they start trying to make change and it tends to be out and down. ‘Cause that’s where they’re seeing problems are. And they haven’t done the work to manage up, to play the politics, to get the relationships, to get the connections, to get the cover so that when they then do manage down, it’s going to ruffle feathers, right? Change, upsets people. So you need to have prepared yourself and others for that disruption and seeded the ground appropriately to make sure that when there’s the hue and cry about change, you are enabled to continue that change.

Not encouraged to just roll it back.

Jesse: And I think it’s on the design leader as well to accurately assess the organization’s true appetite for disruption. 

Peter: Appetite for disruption! 

Jesse: Our new album. 

By the way, you have to know that your leadership is already on board with the chaos that’s going to come with change before you start trying to make it, because if you start trying to make that change when you’re not sure if your boss wants it or is ready for it… I mean, we ran into this over and over again, as consultants at Adaptive Path, where would come into organizations, we would be working directly with a client who was very motivated to create change, had gotten the budget to bring us in and had spun up a whole bunch of work around creating that change. But had not accurately assessed their leadership’s appetite for it. And the work ended up dead in the water as a result.

Peter: Totally. Totally. Yeah. and while it would be easy to point fingers at the super senior leaders for not providing the cover for this new leader to realize the changes they wanted, I did also realize that this new leader hadn’t done their diligence in making sure they’d had the relationships established.

They had gotten very problem-focused and “I’m just going to solve the problem,” which designers do and had lost sight of the people parts around that. 

Jesse: And this is really what was behind my pivot toward leadership coaching,  helping individuals maintain that level of awareness and that level of engagement beyond the tactics of delivery, toward: look around the room, who are the people in the room and how are you engaging with them? Because it’s very easy to think that these problems can be solved with more process when actually what you need to be doing is having conversations with people. 

Jesse: Well that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thanks, Peter.  

Peter: Thank you, Jesse. 

Jesse: He’s @peterme. I’m @jjg.  

Peter: You can find us on our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you can also find past episodes and complete transcripts of every episode, as well as a contact page where you can send us your thoughts. We read everything that comes through, and those submissions have often spurred further discussions.

Jesse: Thanks, Peter. 

Peter: Thanks, Jesse.

Peter: Me me, me, me, me… Do you have a top knot or back knot or something?

Jesse: I have a, I have a high pony.

Peter: Is that what it’s called?

Jesse: That’s what I’m calling it.

Peter: So you have a pony that is high.

Jesse: Yes. Yes.

Peter: It’s those Oakland oats.

Jesse: It’s, it’s wandering around my backyard. Just sort of like eating everything.

In which Jesse and Peter answer questions on funding models, shifting from output to impact, demonstrating value, and the challenges of being a design leader right now.

Questions addressed:

(01:00) “How does a good business fund design activity?”

(09:28) “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role.”

(12:43) “[How can] design influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact one?”

(16:40) “How [can] a design team better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value that the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?”

(26:34) “How can I help my team feel secure and supported when my own world is adrift on stormy seas,” and “How to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times.”

Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse invite you on their journey as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And, as always, with me is Jesse James Garrett. 

Jesse: Hello Peter.

Peter: Hi, Jesse. So today as we enter a kind of summer hiatus, we thought we would take questions from listeners. We polled listeners across Twitter and LinkedIn and got a number of questions. 

To start, thanks to everybody who offered a question, we read them all.

We won’t be able to get to them all. 

There were a set of questions that came in that were essentially around the idea of how to value design

Lar Veale on Twitter asks us: “How does a good business fund design activity?”

Jesse: Where does the money come from?

Peter: This is one of those topics that when I think about understanding what’s really going on behind the scenes, one of those moments for design leaders, at least for some design leaders, is when they realize that finance runs everything.  

Those design leaders have never been equipped to handle that conversation, but the budgets that they get, the headcount that they get, the resources that they get, all of that gets reduced to money. And that money is controlled by those folks over there in finance and in order for design to succeed, the design leader now needs to figure out how to bridge with finance.

Jesse: Right. A whole new audience, a whole new language, a whole different set of things than the leader has ever had to engage with as a designer, most likely.

Peter: When I read this question, I actually thought about a company that we are both familiar with. The funding model was an interesting one. They have a massive centralized product design team.

And the funding for those designers comes from the different lines of business. And so even though the team is managed centrally, the money is contributed, essentially, in a decentralized fashion. And it led to what I considered to be the existential crisis of the design organization, which is a lack of control over how many people they hired and what they had those people work on, because a design leader needs to be able to make a decision around what are people working on, based on the priorities of the business as they understand it.

But if your funding presupposes your headcount, you have now had a key lever of your decision making taken away from you. And then that further puts you in a subservient relationship to that line of business, because you’re basically their work for hire.

Jesse: That’s an interesting take, because it suggests that if you can’t get close to the sources of funding, if you can’t get in a position of power around your funding, you’re never going to have the strategic influence as a design organization that you want to have, is that true?

Peter: I think that’s true. But my ideal world is… Let’s say taking that example where you have different lines of business who all recognize that they need design. Instead of enabling this kind of transactional relationship between that line of business and design, now all those lines of business, somewhat blindly, maybe based on a percentage of their revenue, or percentage of their effort, or some algorithm separate from all of this, that line of business basically pays a tax to the centralized design function. And that goes into a big pool of money that is managed by this design function.

The design team, then looking across the entire business, identifies what matters, what’s important, what are we going to act against, and figures out how to shape its teams and resources to deliver on what the whole business has deemed important.

One of the things that you get with this, that is hard to do when you’re working in this transactional relationship, to answer your other point around being able to make a strategic impact, is that ability to work across the lines of business.

Jesse: You know, I do think that there is a concrete value for businesses in having those purse strings controlled by product owners rather than by design organizations, because those are the people who are currently engaged at that peer level with each other to do that strategic coordination across your product lines.

Unless you’re going to invest design with that responsibility, which really means in some ways elevating design above product management, you’re not going to get there. And so I’m curious about how you do get there. 

So the question is, How does a good business fund design activity? What’s the best funding model for design that you’ve seen in your experience?

Peter: The best model is essentially tied to general company growth. When I was at Groupon, we didn’t have lines of business that funded me or whatever. We had an understanding of how we wanted to grow as an organization, and there was an appreciation of what was needed from a product development standpoint, not just design, but product managers, engineering, data analysis, dev ops, all that kind of stuff.

And design just kind of gets carried along with that growth. Now that ends up leading to ratios often, which is a heuristic for design funding. So if we’re going to hire eight engineers, we’re going to hire one designer. That kind of thing. And those ratios, I’m not against, but I’m not a huge fan of. I find that they are a proxy for understanding growth.

What I’ve tried to do is, when you’re engaged in these headcount planning points in the second half of the year, you’re doing the planning for the next year and you understand what the strategic direction is, and thus what all the programs are. I then plan my designers against those programs, regardless of what other decisions are being made. If we’re going to engage in these five programs of work, well, I’m going to need 10 designers, roughly two per program. And that’s what I asked for. 

What I’ve also learned is you always have to ask for twice as many resources as you actually think you need. 

Jesse: The secret ratio.

Peter: Yeah, well, you know, it’s negotiation. 

When you start operating in these funding models, typical for any large enterprise, you’ve probably already lost the plot, because those funding models end up becoming very transactional and it doesn’t only affect design. 

So you were talking about product management and others. What you’re starting to see is… lines of business. You have your line of business over there. And they’re responsible for P and L of a different business. And then separate from those lines of businesses are technology services. And so these UX designers say are part of a technology service that includes development, engineering, product owners, QA, and dev ops and all that kind of stuff.

Jesse: So everything about product is construed as basically a service organization to the business.

Peter: Exactly. These product development organizations, say they embrace agile at scale, maybe Scaled Agile. 

The problem is baked into agile, baked into scrum. It assumes that that team has autonomy. But if that team is really in service to the line of business, they don’t have autonomy. They’re getting their requirements from outside of their bubble, from people who don’t actually understand what’s happening, but just have these expectations and that really puts the product owner in a difficult position. 

This is one of those challenges, I think, product owners or product managers face that designers often don’t respect or understand—is how much of the decision making has been done before the product owner even starts their work. And they’re just expected to execute on a set of requirements that have been handed to them. One of my clients has been operating in this way and they’re starting to take people from the line of business and make them the product owners.

You know, that’s one of those key distinctions between quote unquote tech, companies, your FAANG companies, and your legacy firms. In tech, those product owners, those product managers are the business there. It’s not a distinction between a line of business and a product.  

In these legacy enterprises, you have lines of business and tech as these distinct entities within the business. And once you have that, you’ve basically already lost it. You’re done. You might as well go back to waterfall. 

Jesse: Wow. that’s I think a bold statement. It’s interesting that you mentioned this just because we actually have an email here that is related to this, coincidentally.

Marina writes in via email, “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role? They are merely order takers for a higher level of the company.” 

And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. She’s sharing the frustration of being in the lead designer role and having to be the person who is chasing down the true meaning behind the requirements that they’re being handed, where the product owners can’t articulate it for them, because it’s not a conversation that they’ve even had with the people in the business that they’re engaging with.

And so then it ends up falling, not on the lead designer, as much as it does on the design leader to reach out into those other parts of the business and start that engagement, but that’s challenging when, to your point about funding models, the funding model that you’ve been set up with creates a prejudice in people’s minds about the nature of the value that you deliver.

There are all kinds of assumptions about your value that are built into how you are funded. And so when you’re engaging with these new parts, these organizations, when you’re diving deeper into the business to have these conversations about the true meaning of these requirements, it’s really hard to engage them in these strategic conversations, when their perception of you is colored by this funding model that puts you in a purely tactical service-oriented role.

Peter: All of that is exactly right. To address Marina’s question, you know, these product owners, they may understand their role, they might be delivering their role. Their role is to execute on what the higher levels of the company have told them. So order-taking might be their role. 

Now, that’s not what we believe is what product owners should be doing, in an ideal context. But that might be what they are expected to be doing in that specific context. And so this is no longer a design and delivery problem.

This is a change management issue. You need to start working with your product peers and engineering peers and, developing arguments for why you should be working differently with those higher orders of the company. You need to help those higher orders of the company understand how they are constraining opportunity from square one with how they are behaving, and that if they want to realize greater potential, need to change how you all work together. 

So, it’s not a straightforward design problem. It is this organization, process-oriented change management problem, that’s going to be really hard, it’s not going to be straightforward. It’s a quick thing to say, and it will take years, it will take literally years to deliver.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, when framed that way, what I hear is a lot of politics and politics is a slow and messy business and anything that requires a lot of politics to bring about is not something that’s going to happen on a six-month timeline. It’s going to be 18 months to two years to lay the groundwork for that kind of change at that scale that you’re talking about.

Music break

Peter: I think we can connect this thread to another question, from Pavel Samsonov, who asks, “It’d be great to hear your thoughts on how designers can influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact-based one.”

When I was working with Capital One, many years ago, I ended up talking a little bit with Aradhana Goel, who developed an approach to trying to address this funding model, to make it less directly transactional—“I give you money. You give me heads.” And instead, because her background was consulting, she was able to draw on that consulting practice and say, “You’re not giving me money for heads. You’re giving me money for results. And here’s my commitment to you. I will deliver this kind of impact through this work. So let’s have that agreement in terms of figuring out what are essentially metrics of our success that I am committing to in exchange for this money. And so you will give me that money. I will spend it as I see fit to deliver that impact. And that’s my commitment to you. And if I don’t deliver on that, you can hold me accountable.” 

And so you change the conversation away from money for heads to money for results. And that’s, I think, essentially what Pavel was asking about. How do you frame it, not so that it’s about artifacts and outputs, but practice and impact.

And the mechanism I’ve seen that works best, it still takes quite a fair bit of management in order to realize its success, but is, OKRs, objectives and key results.

I had a boss, Jocelyn Mangan, she hired me at Snagajob, and she was a firm believer in OKRs. And OKRs done right focus an organization, not on output, but on impact. Key results should be about, How are we making an impact? Key results aren’t, “I shipped something, check.” Key results are “20% of people are engaged in a new activity” or, ”Revenues have gone up 35%,” or whatever, and you focus on those results and whatever it takes to get to those results, that’s up to the team to figure out.

That might be a mechanism that you can introduce to shift that orientation away from output and towards outcomes. And if you’re looking for resources on that front, Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke is probably the best handbook for OKRs that I am familiar with.

Jesse: It’s a good one. You highlight an interesting challenge in this, which is that in a lot of organizations, the way that design work is framed is not actually that much in the control of the design leader. That the way that the value is framed by the executive leadership of the organization is often filtered through the perception of design by your peers, particularly your peers in technology as, as you were talking about, design often ends up lashed to technology, as an enterprise level service in these organizations, then the models by which development and engineering are managed, then become the models that design inherits, because that’s what the executive leadership is used to consuming from their technology organization.

It then entails a reframing of what a performance metric even is in some of these organizations, to bring about the kind of conversation that you’re talking about to shift that perception. 

Peter: I like your use of the verb lashed, like somehow we’re kind of manacled or otherwise like literally bound to these technologies. So what you just said, I think connects, to Chris Jones, who sent us an email:

“I’m curious how you would consult a design team to better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?” 

This is part of why, a number of episodes ago, we talked as much as we did about charter-building and team definition. Design teams don’t do enough to define themselves, which means in the absence of that, they are defined by the others around them and those that preceded them.

Unless a designer is a founder who is establishing a design practice, when the design practice is established, it’s established by a non-designer who has a set of expectations that are likely not as robust or sophisticated as we would hope. And so as design blooms within an organization, it needs to take that time to define itself in a fashion that’s distinct from the other parts of the organization. 

I just did this with a product design team. And there were two aspects that I think are interesting in this regard. One is, and I’m biased towards this term, as you’ll see in a moment, one is we define the design team as essentially bearing the torch for humanism within product development. That recognition that there are people at the other end, those people lead messy lives, and it is the design team’s responsibility to make sure that what we build connects with the humanity that we are serving, because frankly, no one else in product development is in this organization.

The product managers are primarily held responsible to revenue goals, and engineering is held responsible to software delivery. And so no one actually has that empathetic view of the customer. There’s an extractive view of the customer as a source, as a source of revenue, but not an empathetic view of the customer. And so let’s make explicit design exists to serve the customer in that way, because nobody else in this context is.  

And then the other thing you can do is, be very clear in your measures of success, the value that you see yourself bringing. I think there’s some concern that designers, you know, don’t want to be held accountable. It’s like, no, here’s a set of metrics. Hold us accountable. Please hold us accountable. But hold us accountable to stuff that we think that matters, that we can now get others to agree matters. We’re happy to sign up for them. Yeah. So you have to make the time and effort to be explicit about defining design within your context yourselves, and not let others define it for you, or allow it to have happened through neglect or ignorance.

Jesse: Yeah, you can’t just leave it out there and hope that it’s going to be all right. You have to take active control of the message about design and its value within the organization. And I think this comes back around to something that we’ve talked about in the past, which is honestly the need for a design leader, especially early on, to be something of a salesperson for design as a practice, more broadly, and not simply for the value that their team delivers, but the value of design itself.

Peter: Yeah. Looking at Chris’s question again, I think it ties into Pavel’s. “How can I articulate the value the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?” And I think the way you do that is try to understand what does the company value. So in this instance that I was talking about before, the company valued revenue obviously, but, okay.

So if that’s the highest order bit that the company is oriented on, well, then connect what you’re doing to revenue. Show how the efforts of your team will generate more revenue. Maybe reduce the bottom line. It shouldn’t be that hard to connect the efforts of design to those levers that the business is most interested in, you just have to do the work.

When we did that ROI of design report a thousand years ago at Adaptive Path, we had this thing called the linking elephants. Where you connected a business problem with a desired behavior, you measure that behavior, you connect a value metric to that behavior, and then you identify a financial metric.

And so you can say, if, you know, we did this for a financial services client, if we can get 20% of our existing customers to open one additional account, so you have a checking account, we want you to open a savings account, or we want you to have a credit card with us. So the desired behavior opening an account. And then there’s modeling there that should allow you to spreadsheet that out.

But, it requires designers and design leaders to be willing to put on their business hat and work with spreadsheets, which is not something many are comfortable with. But if you want to make the kind of change that people are asking for in these questions, you now need to be part of that conversation.

Jesse: I think that’s true. I will say also though, that models like the linking elephants model presumed that there is a trail to follow there. That it presumes that there is something concrete that you can nail down and name at every stage of that investigation into the underlying value of the work.

But the truth is that that’s not always there. And sometimes the value that’s delivered really is not identifiable in as concrete away. And I think in cases like this, it becomes a question of culture, because the truth is that as much as we think of design as being unique in these organizations, in the sort of weirdness of design as a function, the truth is that most organizations have some functions for which the value and the impact are not tangible in this way. In these organizations, there will be a culture of decision making around how they measure the unmeasurable, how they qualify the unquantifiable, how they come to decisions about areas where there is value that they can perceive, but that value is intangible.

And if you can figure out where the other intangible sources of value are in the organization, learn about the culture of how the organization makes decisions around those things, you can then start to leverage those patterns in how you make the case for the intangible value of design.

Peter: My sense, based on the questions, is that these folks are in an environment where before they get to be culturally intangibly valuable, they need to be explicit and demonstrate some hard value first. I don’t think it’s an either/or, I think it’s a yes-and.

Jesse: I think these questions do come into play to different degrees based on the maturity of the design organization within the larger organization that they’re a part of because yes, in the early days, there is going to be a lot of proving tactical value. Getting those delivery wins in order to start to gain more attention. But then having to push it toward that broader strategic holistic intangible impact conversation because you can’t rely on your executives to do it for you.

Peter: That’s right. That is exactly right. My point was only that you can’t only pursue the cultural intangible.

Jesse: Oh yeah. Yeah. Just, sometimes there is no trail of evidence to follow.

Peter: Right. Yeah. If I think of engineering as really about building, maybe the challenge here is that there’s a building aspect of design, but then there’s the generative and creative aspects of design. 

I think the challenge that we see within the world of quote design unquote, is that there are two components of it that are kind of represented by both sides of the double diamond. There’s design work that can be used in a strategic fashion that identifies opportunities, that’s generative and creative and harder to measure. That’s where you’re going to be more in the intangible. And then there’s the design work in the second diamond. And that’s much more about delivery, much more about production, much more about tweaking to realize incremental gains.

Both are valuable, both are called design, but they’re really different parts of the value chain. They don’t think that that function that helps with delivery, you can take those same practices and generate that strategic understanding.

In either way, design gets dismissed. Design, if seen as a delivery function, design is not brought in to help with the strategic kinds of questions. But if it’s seen as primarily strategic, then design is sometimes just seen as a bunch of hand-wavy management consultants who don’t really know what it takes deliver value in the very end. And it’s just like, we can’t win either way.

Jesse: Right, yeah. I think that’s true. And I think that this leads to some of the confusion in the marketplace about what a UX role even entails. So we have these young people coming out of these UX programs and boot camps and so forth who think that they’re going to get to do soup to nuts UX out there in the world. And the roles that are available, you’re going to be kind of shunted to one side or another.

Music break  

Peter: So two questions that came in, both on Twitter, both addressed the challenges of being a design leader right now. Austin Govella asked about, “helping my team feel secure and supported when my own world is a drift on stormy seas,” and Joie Chung asked, “The main thing top of mind these days is maybe getting advice on how to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times, and especially keeping the morale up after dealing with layoffs of other teams and reorgs because of those layoffs. The key thing is there’s a lot of change and I can’t promise them there won’t be more.”

Jesse: Hmm. Stormy seas.

Peter: So we’ve got stormy seas, rocky times, its a lot of weather, and, nautical references.

Jesse: Well, there’s a lot of weather for sure.

Helping people hang in through layoffs and reorgs is tough. I think it puts everybody into a questioning mindset, and they start questioning things that are not actually up for grabs, but it can feel that way. It can feel like everything about a company is suddenly questionable when the leadership starts making these unexpected and rather dramatic moves. You know, this is where I come back to the stuff that I’ve been talking about all season, which is building emotionally resilient teams. And that has mostly to do with the people that you interact with every day and whether you feel like they are on your side and whether you feel like you are on theirs.

And if you were feeling strong alignment with the people around you, and if you feel like you can show up honestly and vulnerably with what’s challenging you, and can feel supported by the people around you, that goes a long way, because you can’t actually promise as a design leader that there won’t be more change. You can’t promise that that change won’t be really very difficult for people. You can’t insulate them. You can’t keep them safe.

Peter: You can’t promise that you’ll be there.

A glib answer to this that I still think has some merit is, it is up to the leader, even in difficult times, rocky and stormy times, to maintain positivity. If we extend the nautical metaphor, to point the way forward towards calmer seas, to orient people on not getting stuck in this muck, but problem solving around how are we going to get to a more desirable outcome and how do we focus our energies now. Not on worrying about what’s happening around us, that we don’t have control over,  but on doing what we can on the things that we do have control over, to make progress and to chart that progress and to recognize the steps that you’re taking to move things forward, and even if it’s very near term or very seemingly minor, getting folks focused on those steps towards something better.

Jesse: Yeah, I think that what you’re speaking to is a kind of a leveling up that the leader can do. To step back away from the immediate tactical churn of the moment and remind the team, if you’ve done charter work, as we’ve talked about on this show, then you have something to fall back on to talk about shared purpose. And if that charter seems to be in doubt in the current environment, then you have your own sense of purpose to fall back on. And this is something that I think is really critical for maintaining that positivity that you’re talking about, which I agree is absolutely essential, which is that you, as the leader, have to take care of yourself, you have to maintain your own resilience.

You have to maintain your own ability to bounce back in the face of these things. And what that means is making sure that you are, even in the uncertainty, even in the doubt, even in the face of all of it, remembering for yourself, why you do what you do and giving yourself whatever space, whatever time, whatever ritual you need to maintain that connection for yourself so that you can show up for your team.

Peter: Yeah, I… one) try to get plenty of sleep. I find that that has more impact on my personal mood than literally any other thing in my life. As you were talking, it reminded me of a leadership coach that I worked with through this former boss of mine through Jocelyn, she had an executive coach that she brought to work with all of her directs, including me. And this woman had a model that maybe you’re familiar with. I don’t know where she got it from, but it was this idea of the line. And there’s below the line and above the line, and below the line is that initial, emotional, visceral reaction that often is frightened, negative, worried, and her point is to acknowledge that which happens below the line, but don’t let that drive your behavior. Like sit with it, recognize it, work through it. But if you behave based on your below-the-line feelings, you are going to lash out.

You are going to yell, you are going to engage in negative behaviors that bring others down. And so what you need to do is figure out, how do you get yourself above the line, into a more, progressive, positive, optimistic, forward-looking space, that’s still true to the concerns that you were feeling below the line, but now your response is more measured and is one of taking charge, of taking positive action, of problem solving, of, again, that kind of forward motion.

So it’s not a simple reaction. Sometimes, it’s the simplest thing of, like, what we say to a five-year-old before they react: count to 10, take belly breaths. 

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What you’re talking about is behaving intentionally and not reflexively. And those reflexes don’t always look like a big lashing out or yelling at your team or anything like that. Those reflexes can also look like procrastination. They can also look like suddenly becoming really, really vague in your communications or avoiding particular people or particular conversations.

There are lots of counterproductive reflexive habits that are driven by these emotional states that we find ourselves in, and yeah, there’s definitely a lot to leadership that involves simply being able to manage your own emotional states. And being able to process whatever comes up for you and to be able to hold yourself in non-judgment in the same ways that we’ve talked about holding others in non-judgment. In order to maintain, and this fear of trust and mutual support.

First, you’ve gotta be able to give that support to yourself.

Peter: Part of, I think, giving that support to yourself, whether it’s something you invest in directly, or your organization invests in for you, is recognition that you need your outlet, you can’t bottle this stuff up. You need a way to get this out. 

I mean, this was something that Maria touched on when we spoke with her, which is at some point you get to a point where simply talking to your manager isn’t enough. They’re not going to be the ones to help you. And maybe, depending on your relationship with your manager, maybe you can be frank about the challenges you’re facing. You can, you can expose a little bit of that negativity upwards, because you need their help. You need some guidance.  

Jesse: And a good leader should expect that, and be ready for it. 

Peter: Exactly, exactly. So that they can then help you work through that. Maybe even just talk it out. Sometimes it’s one of those things, it’s like therapy. Just getting it out of your head and into the world or sharing that challenge with someone else makes you realize like you’re not alone in it.

And that is enough to help you get from below the line to above the line. But then hopefully they have strategies for thinking about how to address whatever the specific situation is. If you don’t have that, that’s where you might need to find coaches, mentors, but it is incumbent upon you to identify people that you can turn to when things become difficult, or folks are just going to suffer with what you were just talking about, Jesse, in terms of kind of bringing it on themselves and kind of becomes this vicious cycle, even if it’s not aggressive, it might be, procrastinating or literally passive but it’s, it’s problematic. 

Jesse: Yes, there are a million paths to self sabotage.

Peter: How many have you taken?  

Jesse: I’m, I’m, I’m trying to catch them all just like Pokemon.

Uh, you and I, over the course of this first season of this show have often talked about the path of the leader as a fairly lonely one and a fairly isolating one and a fairly solitary one. And we often talk about what do you do when you’re the only one who can do the thing that needs to be done. And I think that what you point out is really essential for all leaders, which is not to stay alone. But to go find yourself a peer group and find some folks that you can turn to for support.  

Peter: Right. I want to, refocus on a word that both Joie and Austin had, which was the word “secure,” and Joie asks how to help designers feel safe/secure. Austin asks, “helping my team feel secure and supported.” And I think… I’m not certain… I’m thinking through this… I’m not certain that it is the design leader’s job to provide security, particularly in the face of this rockines, if that security feels like a false promise, right? 

You don’t want to mislead, and security might literally be misleading to your team.

Here, that security would be, “Everything is going to be fine. You’re not going anywhere. You’ve got a good job. Do work and it will all be okay.” That might not be true. And you might know that might not be true. And so don’t provide a false sense of security if that’s not going to help your team actually do what they need to, to address whatever the situation is. Austin used the word “supported.” That, you can do. That is within your control. You can support your team a hundred percent and you should do everything you can to support your team. Get them the resources they need. Give them the time that they need, give them guidance around how to move forward in the ways we were talking about. Maybe it’s baby steps on project work, and just focus on what we do control and try to ignore what we don’t control to make your way through, Right? 

So you can support them. But I don’t think you can help them feel secure. Their security is their responsibility. Through your supporting actions, through your nurturing actions, through your leadership and guidance, you are going to affect their security, but you cannot provide security. They are not your children. 

Jesse: You can definitely undermine a sense of security through your choices.

Peter: Well, right. And you will undermine that sense of security if you provide a false sense of security that then is not delivered on. As we discussed, then 

they’ll just lose trust, and then all bets are off. So, what I would say is focus less on security and focus more on trust. And engage in behaviors that encourage your team to trust you. ‘Cause that’s about all you’re going to have control over, and one another, because that’s all your going to have control over. 

Jesse: Yes.  Beautifully put. 

Peter: Does that distinction make sense to you? 

Jesse: Oh, yeah, that does make sense to me. Yeah, I actually don’t have anything to add to that. That was great. So with that, I think we ought to just say thank you to folks for sticking with us through these first 15 episodes.

Peter: Yeah, this is 15, huh?  Wow.

Before we go, I do want to shout out folks who sent us questions that we did not yet get to. This is going to be like Magic Mirror on Romper Room. I’m not going to give people’s full, I’m not going to give people’s full names. But Dan, Daniel, Shelby, Sharon: Jesse and I see you, we read you, we appreciate your questions. Some of those questions frankly are episodes in and of themselves. And we expect to get to them when we’re on the other side of this hiatus, we will not lose them, but we couldn’t get to it.

Jesse: All good questions, some of them we were so confident we would come back to, we wanted to give them enough space.

Peter: Exactly. Exactly.

So with that, we are wrapping up another episode of Finding Our Way, and wrapping up what Jesse and I have referred to as this first season, this 15 episode chunk. We are taking some time off for the summer. And so…

Jesse: Get out in the sunshine! 

Peter: That’s right. get some vitamin D, limit our exposure to COVID and episodes should be be coming out again, sometime, we think in the late-ish August timeframe. 

Jesse: Right around Labor Day, plus or minus. 

Peter: Yeah. And so until then, we thank you for joining us on our journey, as we have been figuring out how we find our way through some of these challenges of design and design leadership.

And just because we are not publishing doesn’t mean we’re not around, feel free to hit us up on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg.  You can find us through our website, https://findingourway.design/, where you can also find all of our episodes, transcripts of every episode, and then a contact form that we read.

That’s where some of the questions that we have received came through. And until then have a great summer, take care of yourselves. Take care of those around you. And we look forward to further discussions in the future. Thank you, Jesse.

Jesse: Finding our way. 

Peter: [Singing] How many roads must a man walk down before he is a… 

Jesse: Is the, this is the musical episode, finding our way.

Peter: [Singing] A whole new world.

Jesse: Peter, what are you doing?

Peter: I’m singing. I had a, I had a double espresso, on top of my morning coffee, so I am good to go.

Jesse: Oh man. Well, I should have been more prepared, I guess…

Peter: You can…

Jesse: I thought we were going to sort of take it easy here for the last…

Peter: You can be yin to my yang.

Jesse: Isn’t this where we came in?

In which Peter shares some of his Design Leadership Truisms (inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer), and Jesse reacts.

The image that spurred the episode:

Truisms discussed:
“People are not their job titles.”
“If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations.”
“Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude.”
“If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself.”
“You cannot calculate an ROI for design.”
“If you haven’t pissed someone off, you are not doing your job right.”
“For someone who talks a lot about empathy. You show little for your colleagues.” 
“Introversion inhibits design’s ultimate impact.”

Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett.

Jesse: Hello, Peter.

Peter: Hi Jesse.

Jesse: So we were riffing on in email other things that we could talk about today and sort of almost in passing, you shared this image with me, which, is this a slide from one of your talks?

Peter: Yeah. So, last October I spoke at the Design Leadership Summit and I gave my design leadership talk called “Coach, Diplomat, Champion, Architect:  The Four Archetypes of the Design Leader.” And when I first gave this talk, at the very end, I tacked on what I called “hard truths about design leadership,” and it was a series of statements.

And I realized before this event, because this event was a little more homegrown, a little less polished, I felt I could play with it a bit more. I actually ended up pulling up those statements at the very beginning. And what I did was essentially a cold open, so I walk out on stage, you can see in this… there’s a YouTube video, I walk out on stage wearing all black. A black shirt, black pants. And the title slide says “Design Leadership Truisms, from mer-Holzer” because I’m trying, I’m playing on Jenny Holzer, and her work with truisms. And then I just state each of these truisms.

And then the slide I gave you was all those truisms on one slide, just like, here’s everything that I just shared. And I ended up doing that as this preamble to my normal talk.

Jesse: I love this. So, first of all, I definitely, when I was reading the slide, detected the Holzer-ian nature of it. Her work is something that I’ve admired for many, many years. And I think anybody who has read any amount of what I’ve done can detect a trend toward the aphoristic.

Peter: Declarative aphoristic.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. The desire to reduce ideas down to their most potent and concise expression. And that is something that I’ve always admired about Jenny Holzer’s work as an artist as well. And so you sent me this thing, and that sounds awesome by the way, dressing all in black. I think it’s always a smart look. 

And I just started reading a couple of them and I was like, I have opinions about these. And then I put it away. And I was like, I want to talk about these opinions later. So there were a couple of these that I’ve glanced at for a while…

Peter: So is now later? 

Jesse: Later has arrived, Yes. And I thought it would be fun for us to just read through them and talk about them and see how many we get through in the time that we have. And, maybe see if there are any of them where we have any particularly interesting reflections or points of contention. 

Peter: Why don’t I read them?  Since I wrote them. 

Jesse: Okay. In fact, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put the slide away, so I’m not looking at it. So I’m just listening to you read.

Peter: Great.

Jesse: Implicit in this, I sense, is the idea that you should not treat people like they are their job titles.

Peter: Yes, basically, too often we are encouraged, particularly as managers, to reduce people to their job title and then swap people with the same job title and treat them the same, treat them interchangeably.

And we need to engage with everybody as individuals. A job title should not define anyone.

Jesse: Well, I think, especially when you’re talking about design roles, where the particular background, the particular creative strengths of the individual are going to very, very strongly influence the results that you get, I think that is definitely true. 

I think there is a spectrum. That there are some roles that are more operational, that are processes that can be taught. But in the case where you are looking at people who are going to make a creative contribution to where the entire endeavor is going, in those cases, you do want to look more closely at the individuals and what they bring to the table.  So yeah. Yes. And yes.

Peter: I’m not going to read them all. I’m realizing I’m going to skip a couple. 

Jesse: You should definitely choose because there are too many. 

Peter:

Jesse: I’m going to say no to this one. I think that there are lots of ways in which a team’s work can go wrong. I also think expectation setting from leaders can go awry when the leaders themselves are not clear on what they want. So there’s knowing what you want and then there’s communicating it. And those are separate skills.

Peter: Right. So that would be not setting clear expectations.

Jesse: Okay. Fair.

Peter: Behind this, is talking to design leaders who are frustrated by the quality of the work their team is producing, but then when you ask them what they have done to help people understand what is acceptable in terms of quality, you realize the answer is, “Nothing.”

I’ve literally had conversations with design leaders who basically imply that they feel other people should read their minds as to what is an acceptable level of quality and deliver on that.

Jesse: I hear that. And I definitely have seen that. And. I know that I have gotten impatient in the past with designers when I felt that I had to explain something to them that I felt they should already know about what constitutes quality in design, and that impatience for me came from an expectation that I wouldn’t have to be teaching as much as I found myself teaching in that role, in that context, in that moment, especially in the context of consulting work, where there was potentially not really enough time to teach skills along the way as we were trying to meet client deadlines. 

So I think there’s an element in this of how much mentorship is the leader willing to take on, in bringing people along with understanding their expectations. And what do you do when that gap really does exist, when there is somebody who simply doesn’t understand the baseline thing that you thought you wouldn’t have to explain.

Peter: There is no universal standard for quality when it comes to design.  

So when I talk to these design leaders and I ask them, so how does someone deep within your team know what good looks like? And when they think about it, they respond, “Well, I guess that’s their manager helping them, like through direction or critique or review.” 

So design quality, two things there. One, it becomes very localized, and so different managers with a different understanding of quality might be managing towards different quality within the same organization. And two, it’s largely folklore, it’s spoken. It is not codified, and that raises its own challenges. Because something that’s not codified can become quite arbitrary. It can change, and that’s not great. 

One assumes that, if you are hiring someone, they know what they’re doing, right? You’ve gone through some process to vet their ability. And if they’re not doing good work too often, I find the design leader thinks that they don’t know good design. When in fact they don’t know what good design looks like in this environment or what is expected of them.

Jesse: So definitely I hear in that, the trap of assuming that your standard is a universally held standard, that is therefore universally understood by your fellow professionals. Right?

Peter: Right. I have a few elements here on this that are related to quality. Let me read the next one. 

Jesse: So what you’re saying is a good designer can produce bad design if they are in the wrong context. And it seems to be letting the designer off the hook a little bit in terms of what they bring to the table. This seems to imply that individual performance issues are more often a sign of organizational dysfunction. Either that dysfunction exists at the level of recruiting and hiring, or it exists at the level of performance management and mentorship and skills development.

Peter:

Jesse: Hmm. I don’t think I believe that. In fact, I think that articulates a gap that I am trying to fill in my work, in that I think the quality arises out of high-trust, collaborative relationships and not out of organizational structures.

Peter: I don’t disagree. I think I would place that as an organizational matter, the point of this being, design quality is often not addressed until you’re looking at output. When, in fact, what drives that output was heavily determined by a series of factors long preceding that output, that I am maybe broadly labeling is organizational, but I would also argue organizational as opposed to say procedural, or a matter of process.

Jesse: Okay. So what is the distinction between organization and process in your view? Because I guess that those things are very much intertwined to me.

 Peter: So I wrote a whole book on organization and never really addressed process, except for including the Double Diamond briefly. When we talk about design, we often talk about process—that’s a thing you can talk about ‘cause it’s set of activities, it’s a set of methods, it’s a shared understanding that we can bring to the conversation.

What we often don’t talk about are the organizational factors behind the scenes that lay a foundation for the activities: how you recruit and hire, how you manage, how you mentor, how you grow, how you value, how you coordinate in relationship with one another within design, and how you coordinate In relationship between design and other functions. All of those things are the organizational matters.

Your internal agency organization can be practicing user centered design.

It’s just going to find itself highly constrained because all that user research is almost for naught because it’s not actually able to drive the upfront thinking because, organizationally, the designers aren’t in the right relationship with their peers, with the power to make that change.

Jesse: I guess there were a few different ways to think about it. So, there is a football analogy that comes to mind, which is that you have the players on the field and the players are playing certain positions. And you have different ways you can line those players up according to those positions. And there are different positions you can deploy on the field, according to your needs. And so that feels like the organizational stuff. Who are the players on the field? What are the skills that I’m putting out there to accomplish my goal? 

And then you’ve got process, which is the playbook. Once you get the players on the field, how do they interact with each other? How do they move in an organized way toward a goal? 

And then you’ve got the people stuff at the individual level of the stuff that you’ve been talking about, recruiting and hiring and making sure that the guy that you have brought in as wide receiver is actually somebody who is suitable to be a wide receiver. 

But I think there’s this other level, too, of team cohesion. And this is something that I’ve heard you talk about, about how the coordination, the orchestration of the individuals who are performing these roles in the context of this process and ensuring that they stay in sync with one another along the way. And that’s the rocky shoal that I’ve seen too many corporate ships run aground on. They got all the organizational stuff right. They got all the process stuff right. But no one was looking after the people. No one was looking after the relationships and it all fell apart along the way.

Peter: Hmm, I guess I would say if you’re not looking after people and relationships, you’re not looking after the organizational stuff. You might be architecting an organization.  

Jesse: I guess that’s the thing that I hear in this that I would push back against, is the architectural impulse to think that you can solve all of these problems, a priori, before any people show up in the door.

Peter: Yes, that I believe. Part of my point is to shift the focus, though, away from process and even, again, individual aptitude, towards matters of organization. And I would include relationship within that, because as I see it, when you have an organization, you don’t only have the structure, but you have the connection between those elements and, yes, you could even look at that architecturally, but there’s a relationship there that I think matters and is part of what I intend when I talk about organization.

Jesse: Okay. Well, thank you. That’s clarifying to me.I don’t know if I have a particularly narrow view of it, or if I have inherited a particularly narrow view of it from the things that I’ve read, but I tend to think of the organizational stuff, in terms of let’s figure out management reporting, performance management, incentive structures, that will ensure a certain quality of outcome.

And I don’t think that stuff goes far enough. And I agree with you. I don’t think the process stuff goes far enough either.

Peter: Well, and my sense is folks focus on that which they can get their hands around, and the structural organizational stuff is easier. But insufficient. It’s the same reason that one of the challenges that we have in delivering good designed experiences is we end up getting nudged towards delivering only on that which can be measured. Through monthly active users. And, how far down a funnel someone gets, et cetera, et cetera.

And we lose sight of this stuff, which can’t be measured, but which is as important in terms of the nature and the quality of the experience. And that comes from a bunch of ineffable details that someone is having engaging with an experience. And the same thing happens with organizations where they over-focus on that which can be measured and modeled, and lose sight of the messy stuff that, as you’re pointing out, is kind of the beating heart of those organizations.

Jesse: I think a corollary of this is the tendency of leaders, when they find themselves challenged by their circumstances, to fall back on those areas where they feel the most empowered, and often the areas where they feel the most empowered are the areas where they feel they have the most control, where they feel like they can dictate circumstances rather than be subjected to them. And so this is where you have leaders run into challenging times and declare it’s time for a reorg, and the team is like, great, this is another challenge on top of the challenges that we were already facing, because reorgs create just immense waves of chaos and confusion through organizations.

But from the leadership perspective, it can feel like they’re taking control of the situation, when in fact all they’re doing is retreating to the things that they do feel some level of control over, because they don’t know what to do about the things that they don’t.

Music break

Peter:   

Jesse: Ooh, I suspect that’s almost certainly true, but I’d love to hear your articulation of an argument for it.

Peter: So in 2002, Adaptive Path attempted to unpack the notion of an ROI for design, an ROI for user experience. 

What we found was that you couldn’t calculate an ROI for design because design is too integrated with too many other activities, that you can’t isolate design in any meaningful way. That said, what we saw was when you consider design as a lever for business value, when it was involved in the right conversations, when those activities of design were informing strategy, then those businesses both seemed to fare better, and the design teams were much happier, were much more engaged and did what was believed to be better work. 

Jesse: I think a lot of this has to do with how UX design has always grown up in the shadow of engineering and engineering management practices and the strong cultural trend within engineering management to attempt to quantize and reduce the work to something that is measurable factory-like piecework.

I mean, one of the most legendary pieces of writing in software engineering management is a book called The Mythical Man Month, which is about, in fact, how you can’t effectively quantize a lot of these things, because you can’t reduce software engineering to that kind of piecework. Software engineering management methods have adapted a lot in the time since that book was written, but there is still this desire that I see in waterfall and agile and everything that’s come since to try to squeeze the work down. 

And design is even weirder. A very small amount of design can deliver a vastly disproportionate amount of value across an entire product in a way that the same chunk of development time can’t accomplish the same thing.

And I think that is the disjunct between engineering management practices and design management practices that leads to these breakdowns that we see in these organizations.

Peter: Totally. That’s exactly—…

Peter:  

Jesse: I think that’s true for as long as design leaders continue to be forced into the role of cultural change agents within organizations, for as long as we are continuing to have to fight for the voice of user research in strategic decisions. As long as we are having to continue to argue for experimentation and collaboration and iteration and adaptation in business strategy and design strategy and technology strategy, we are going to continue to be in this position of resident gadfly within organizations.

My hope is that eventually we get to a place where we have more leaders who understand where we’re coming from, and we don’t have to piss as many people off in order to make our points. It’s an outstanding question for me, whether that is actually possible.

Peter: Right. And there’s a kind of double-edge to this because, you’re talking mostly around a design leader, working with non-designers, and pissing them off as part of change. There’s also, if you haven’t pissed someone off within your team, you’re probably not doing something right.

Jesse: Okay. This, I would like to hear more about. 

Peter: Well, right? Because leadership requires making hard decisions and you’re taking a lot of different stuff from different people. But as the leader, you are the one with the authority to make a decision and set a direction.

And that will likely go against somebody’s input that was delivered to you. 

I’ve hired people over the objection of folks who were part of the process, because I felt that their contribution, while informative, was essentially misguided, and I had to make a hard call of who to hire between two candidates.

And I made a call that ended up pissing some people off. 

I could have either tried to make a more popular call, hiring the person who people were more aligned with, but I didn’t feel that was the right call.