Navigating Design Transformation in Organizations

Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership,

Jesse: On today’s show, Koji Pereira, Chief Design Officer for Brazilian fintech Neon, joins us to talk about his career journey from Brazil to Silicon Valley and back again, finding the balance between speed and quality, and strategies for making the design team and the design process more inclusive.

Peter: Thank you so much for joining us, Koji. I think where we’d like to begin is just to get a better sense of your story. Who are you? What are you about? Where are you from? And what are you up to?

Koji: Awesome. Well, first of all, thanks a lot for having me, Peter and Jesse. I’m very happy to be here. I’ve been following the podcast and you’re doing a great work. Thanks for that.

Koji’s story

Koji: I am originally from Brazil and I think my story began on design with graphic design. I was on graphic design for a pretty short period of time, starting doing posters for bands. I had my own band back in 1997 and then the internet was becoming a thing in Brazil and, you know, I was an early adopter. Before, I had a BBS, a bulletin board system where people could, you know, call my BBS and access pretty much like a website on DOS, which was crazy.

So when the internet began, I was like, this is interesting, because to me, there’s a potential here for design to become something interactive and something with motion. And, you know, I started doing websites for companies and small businesses. And then around the year 2000, I joined another person who was building this website where people could order food from, and it was desktop internet back then, people would open a website, turn on their computers, that would take a lot of time anyways, then dial up to internet connection, open a website, and then, let’s say, 15 minutes later, they have a website where they can order pizza from.

And I had a server connected to a facsimile. And we had a software that would send orders to the pizza place. Then the pizza place would deliver the pizza, they would get the money in cash. And that was our business model.

Basically we were like a white list or yellow list for pizza. And we had this small service that run in the background. So that was my first experience with web design back then. And because of this company, we ended up selling this and I joined Google to work on Orkut. I don’t know if you all recall was the biggest

Peter: I’ve met Orkut.

Koji: You met Orkut? Okay, cool. So you’re very familiar, but for people who don’t know, Orkut was the biggest social network in Brazil and India. In U.S. I think was most of the time the second, losing for MySpace at some point and for, I think, was Friendster before.

Jesse: Yeah.

Koji: And of course, like Google was a totally different world for me back then.

Working in tech

Koji: The typical corporate job was very different from what it is today, and especially in Brazil, even more different. And for me coming from like a very, you know, half neighborhood in Brazil and going to this world, working at Google and even in Brazil was so, so different for me and kind of opened my eye to a lot of different stuff. So I think that’s pretty much how I began back in my career with product design, UX slash web design at that time.

Peter: Tell us a little bit about kind of how you’ve evolved as a designer and design leader.

Koji: Right. So I stay at Google for almost 10 years, and the reason why I stay 10 years is because with Google you have so many options, right? Like you can move from one team to another team, and there’s always these smaller teams trying to build something new. And those are the teams that I liked the most.

You know, I was never really excited about the teams that were kind of, you know, keeping things going in a bigger scale. I was more interested on, like, teams are building something from scratch, zero to one products. And the last team that I joined was a team that I enjoyed the most, which was Next Billion Users.

And to me, it was full circle because we’re trying to create products for emerging markets. Back then, we did a lot of research in India, Brazil, China, too, and Africa, and we build a product called Files. And what Files did was help people to free up space in their phones by looking at their storage.

And for us here in the U.S. might not be an issue, but when you look at the population in the world, like 80 percent of people are using, at that time, Android. Most of the people are in phones that are under 300 dollars. So those are phones that, after three months, If you use WhatsApp a lot, then your phone is fully blocked with things and there’s nothing you can do with that.

So with that team, we build Files and we help people to free up space and became like a one billion users app; from zero to one billion. And it became the default file manager for Android right?

So that’s when I decided to, okay, like now I built something from scratch at Google, became very successful, I want to go and work in totally different fields, smaller companies. And that’s when I joined Lyft and Lyft to me was this interesting mix of service design, product design. You know, it’s a marketplace with multiple types of users. You have the social interaction and the, real life business model going on behind that, which is something that Google was not really working at the space that Lyft is right now.

And that’s where I learned a lot because when I joined Lyft, I saw that the way that Lyft thought about design was super, super different from the way we thought about design at Google.

And then like I joined Twitter later, it was all about coming back to social and working in a product that was more established in the social space. And that was pretty interesting area to be for me because I was able to use some of the learnings that I had back at Google, but in a product that was already kind of established and have more users in the end of the day.

To where I am now, where again, I feel like it’s all the circles that come back and forth now working for Brazil remotely here in US. It’s a company called Neon. So it’s a fintech banking company, which for many might not be known, but banking and digital banking in Brazil is one of the biggest space for fintech companies in the world right now.

Jesse: So I’d like to rewind to that moment early in your career where you got started doing web design for the Brazilian market and then Orkut, you find yourself thrown into a different context, different kinds of design challenges. And especially designing for a much broader and more diverse audience than you had before.

And then I notice as you were talking that this seems to be this recurring theme for you of trying to address these very large scale challenges for very large scale audiences that are potentially very different from you. And I’m curious about how that’s informed how you approach design as a design leader.

Koji: That’s a great question. So Google was not interested in building something specific to one group of users. When we talk about like, what’s your target? At Google, we’re pretty much saying like, our target is everyone.

We want to build something that works for everyone. And in one hand, this is almost, you know, impossible because, of course, like, in the world, you have so many different people and different cultures and different interests and different even perception of aesthetics, in a sense of visual design.

On the other hand, if you build something that really tackles a pain very well in one place, and then you’re able to figure out how to adapt that solution to other realities, then you’re likely be able to build something that will be more successful than if you start building something that are meant to be for everyone from the beginning.

If you think about even Facebook, right? Like when they started, they started as a niche kind of product for universities and then they slowly grow to what they are now. So, same thing for Google. I felt like when the products that I worked on where we try to really build something huge from the beginning, some of them, I don’t think they really worked, because we’re trying to embrace the world from the beginning.

Whereas for Files, because, and I will take WhatsApp as an example too. Because WhatsApp started with a very specific pain in a very specific market that helped them to grow and scale to other markets because they’re kind of solving a pain that only existed in certain parts of the world with certain parts of users, where they lack, you know, very fast connection or the connection was laggy.

And because of that, they built a very good messaging system that works pretty well, even if you’re hiking in Yosemite and the internet is not working. Whenever you go back and you have your connection back, all the messages are keyed and they will be sent. Right now, all the messaging apps, most of the messaging apps do this type of resilience over laggy connection, but back, I don’t know, three years ago, Whatsapp was a pioneer on that. And, you know, pretty much every single messaging app kind of followed that lead.

Company-specific design

Jesse: Another thing that you touched on in here is the difference that you noticed in the way that different companies think about and approach design. There’s a strong sense, I think, among people who work outside the Valley, that the Valley is really kind of strongly unified in its approach to product development, and they’re sometimes surprised to hear that Lyft might have a different approach to design than Google has.

What did you notice there?

Koji: So many things, but I’ll start with craft, the focus on craft, quality, versus speed or the balance between speed and quality. I think that changes from company to company and for certain companies, it’s part of the DNA, right?

Like if you think about Apple, I’m pretty sure that Apple is not afraid of delaying things, even to an extent of being the second or the third in market. We see that with Vision Pro. In a way for them to be able to then work in something that is more finished and more refined.

And you see companies like Lyft and Airbnb that maybe sits in the mid range of the scale. I think Figma probably will also fall in that category where they, have a better balance of quality versus speeds of the market. And then you have other companies which are more all about speed and it’s not that it’s wrong. You see that many of those companies are very successful and they’re able to evolve their designs over time, whenever they launch the MVP, whatever, but it just becomes part of their DNA, right? Like it’s hard to change that once established, once it’s like, two or three years old of practice.

And to me, that’s the trickiest part when I join as a design leader in an organization, like, what is our way of doing design? What is quality and what is good design for us? And of course, like, that to me is connected to all the, umbrellas of design. It’s not just visual. It’s not just interaction. It’s also research. It’s also, how do we make decisions. It’s also, how do we operate with other teams. It’s also, how do we connect the go-to-market strategies to the design strategy. Like, what are the things that we care about? What are the things that we are open to make tradeoffs in terms of speed, to make sure that we deliver something that it’s on the bar that we believe our company is set to do.

Peter: To the question Jesse asked earlier, there’s this assumption of kind of a monolith when it comes to Silicon Valley and tech companies. And clearly they’re different.

But also I find that a lot of designers and design leaders want to think that the businesses they work for are rational, right? And they’re making decisions based on some clear framework, rational framework, that’s driven by some concept of business value. But, if that were true, then every company, well, maybe not, but I was about to say, maybe every company would work the same, right?

‘Cause if there is a rational way of running a business, then everyone should approach that business similarly in order to maximize their returns. But clearly that’s not how it works. And so I’m wondering, kind of, what you’ve unpacked in terms of these different corporate cultures, different environments, different contexts that suggest where these bars are set for design and craft and quality.

Make sure it’s a fit

Koji: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s an amazing question. It’s, first of all, it’s very hard. And that’s something that when I mentor, other people, I tend to say, like, the most important thing for you when you’re interviewing is to find the right place for you. It’s not just, you know, getting hired in the end of the day.

One, because you can become miserable very quickly. Second, because if it’s not a fit, then, it won’t work for you, mid, long term. So, yeah. There is a few things that I learned so far.

First of all, you can’t like really think that the CEO won’t make a difference, right? Like a CEO makes a lot of difference. Like how does CEO think about design makes a lot of difference. Does the CEO really care about quality in the way that you care about. I think that will be the first fit question to me. And maybe you’re not, you know, responding to the CEO directly, but if you’re just talking with the company, you can just go to YouTube and see some interviews and podcasts with that CEO. And that will give you a lot of hints of how the CEO thinks about quality, and I would not even say design, but quality in general.

Then the second thing to me is just looking at the product itself, because when you look at the product, I think that’s a classical thing, right, at this point already where you can look at a product and say this is created by, you know, this team and this is created by another team and those teams clearly don’t talk to each other, right?

Like that’s one thing that you can clearly identify when you look at a product.

Second thing is, you know, is this product really run in a way that things are being pushed to promote things, promote specific areas or specific features. We all remember, like, the web news portals back then where they have a lot of pop ups and ads. I think those are things that you can really identify when you look at a product where teams are kind of just pushing their products in the whatever home screen or the most important part of the UI versus a product that really coordinate those things and create something that is a scalable. So those teams get their exposure, but at the same time it’s not disjoint, right?

So I would say CEO and the product will tell you a lot about those things. There’s other things that I kind of feel that maybe give you the hint sometimes, but there’s so many times that I got it wrong by looking at, I don’t know, let’s say the principles, right? Like, which is beautiful to see, but then how many times you see like a company that has perfect principles or even design principles and then you join or you talk with someone who works there and they say like, Oh, no, this is just to put in a wall. That’s not real.

Jesse: This issue of speed versus quality is one that I hear a lot about from my coaching clients and in a lot of cases, the way that they frame this challenge is as one of culture change. That they find themselves in a culture that tips that balance toward speed and away from quality. And they see it as their role as the design leader to advocate for a different culture and to try to drive a different culture.

I’m wondering, listening to what you’re saying, whether from your perspective, that kind of culture change is even really possible. What do you think?

Koji: I mean, it’s nuanced to me, because it really depends. I mean, like, let’s be clear here. Perfect to me is when you have a balance, right? It’s not like too late in the market, but it’s also not too fast in a way that you can really launch something that you’re proud of or not even proud of, because you know, I would say that you have to launch something as quick as possible so you can actually have time to learn with that.

But I think what’s most important is to understand and have agreements, right? Like, and you can have that agreement even before you join a company, you can talk with the CEO, you can really understand, like, how that CEO thinks about speed versus quality and see if you have a common, you know, agreement on that.

Like, do you feel like you are in the same page? And I think that helps a lot for me, like having that conversation before joining me on, it helped me a lot to just establish some agreements and some things that I use later. After I join, then it’s more about the tactic, like how do you get to that, you know, agreement that you already had.

And I would say in this case it wasn’t that hard because I had this conversation before. And to me, it was more about how do I actually communicate that decision to the rest of the team, to the rest of the other VPs and the other organizations. And that can be done by, and in my case was more about like creating processes where we have design reviews, we have certain mandates where we don’t launch anything until it’s approved in a design review.

Which I know is not the default for many companies, but it’s something that we decided that it would be important for us because the bar was so low and we really wanted to raise the bar for design at Neon. Maybe in a different company where design is already high quality, maybe that’s not needed.

And that’s something that I would say it’s important to have as an agreement as you start your role the leadership.

Working at Neon

Peter: This is awesome. I’d love to dig into Neon since you’ve brought it up. You’ve been there a couple of years now. You’re the chief design officer. What does that mean? Where are you in this organization? Who are you reporting into? Size of the org? Just situate us in your current context.

Koji: Yeah, so my team right now is 33 people. I report directly to the CTO. I reported most of the time to the CEO, but we had a change of structure where CEO was having too many reports. I think it’s another common theme. And now I’m reporting directly to the CTO. In terms of how I spend my time, I would say like 50 percent on working with the VPs and other C levels in the company to, you know, understand structure, understand the business, what direction we’re taking, how my team can help on that direction, and 50 percent of time working with my team to really, like understand where we’re going in terms of execution and making sure that the quality level is being kept. That first 50 percent is also spent with like presenting to leadership things or presenting, you know, the thing that we just did.

We just launched a new version of the app in the beginning of this year. And that began by myself presenting to the board what the vision for this new web would be. That was about a year and a half ago. So one year, and a few months to put the vision to a closure, I would say because we started implementing the first steps, let’s say five months after the first speech.

Peter: And you’re in San Francisco. Where is your team located?

Koji: So, We started a office here in the Bay Area. We have 30 people in us right now. CTO is here. CPO is here. We have a small office in San Mateo. But most of the company is in Brazil and the CEO is there. Some VPs are there. I would say the company is 2000 people. So then you can tell that we’re minority here in us.

From Brazil to the US and back again

Peter: One of the themes Jesse and I have been pursuing this past season is design leadership outside of the United States. And one of the reasons we were interested in talking to you is your experience leading design in Brazil, coming to the United States, learning kind of how design and design leadership operates here, and now, even though you’re still physically located in the United States, you’re working with a Brazilian company or you’re engaging with what I’m assuming, correct me if I’m wrong, is a different corporate culture, different kind of approach to how things are done.

And I’m curious, just kind of how that’s been as part of the journey, kind of situating yourself, not just necessarily in a business culture, but like that broader social culture and what you’ve had to navigate, maybe what you learned that you’ve been able to bring back, what you’ve had to let go of in order to embrace, kind of, your new reality.

Koji: I love that question. Yeah, Brazilian culture is so different in many sense and I’ve been here in the U.S. 10 years. I feel like I’m not even 100 percent Brazilian anymore. Like I’m, you know, when you’re an immigrant you say like you live between worlds, right? Like you’re not here and not there. So first of all, Brazilians are definitely a more relationship-based, workforce. Even here like there is a different between East coast and West coast. I would say that we’re more West coast than East coast for sure, in terms of culture, in terms of how we work. But even more, even more closer, I would say.

Then the second thing that to me was a big shift is just like how companies operate in general.

In Brazil, there is so many, and I think here too, like, when you look at especially the smaller companies, the startups, they tend to just grab a specific framework and be so tied to that framework, and try to like replicate every single thing of that framework.

And I think Scrum is probably one of those frameworks that were kind of produced everywhere. And for some reason people thought that it was a default in Silicon Valley, when in reality, like most of the companies I work for, they never use anything from Scrum outside of a standup you know?

And same thing happened with the Spotify squads. Spotify launched that post about squads and all of a sudden, all the companies were building squads and, you know, the reality of squads to me is, imagine you’re going to a party, you have a squad that is cleaning the floor, a squad that is, you know, fixing the dinner, a squad that is you know, working with the beverage, and the floor is super dirty, the food is done, the beverages are ready to drink. But nobody is helping the, floor sweeping squad because they’re not from that squad.

You know, that’s the most common issue I see with squads is that they feel like they can’t do anything else other than that specific problem, space, or even feature, which is the worst because, you know, initially squads were not even meant to be a specific feature. And now they’re locked in in that feature that may not even have a market fit, because they’re supposed to be in that squad. So you know, all these frameworks, I think, they have good things, with squads, you have autonomy, you have great sense of ownership, but they all have limitations that when you look at a book, when you look at a blog post, those limitations are not stressed.

And when you go to Brazil, for instance, and you go to a smaller startup, they lack references and they just grab that book or grab that blog post and replicate it a hundred percent. Whereas the outer maybe just did that once or maybe saw that working in three, four companies, but might not work for you.

So that’s. That’s the most common issue that I saw in terms of culture once I joined smaller companies, but also working with Brazil.

Jesse: As I reflect on these examples of cultural breakdown that you’re talking about, it’s interesting to notice the role that alignment plays in this. And keeping teams aligned around common purpose, and for the leader just stepping into an organization, as you touched on earlier, the importance of vetting and validating that you as a leader are in alignment with the intentions of the larger organization, the philosophy of the larger organization, how they measure success, what constitutes good, what constitutes done, those kinds of things.

And I’m curious about, especially outside your own team, cross-functionally, how you build that alignment, especially from your seat at the executive level.

Koji: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many ways to me. It’s all about, you know, really understanding each other, really like building empathy and understanding. That everyone in the leadership team, they have their own struggles. And finding a way to help each other and to really, like, understand where our shared language or where our shared goals are…

Jesse: mm hmm.

Koji: …those to me are most important things to do. There’s no recipe to do this. It’s just, like, time, a lot of, like, one on ones, a lot of get togethers, a lot of, like, hard conversations and tough discussions. That’s the only way to figure out where to be. I would say a lot is through understanding that people have no clue and that’s okay, what design is, right? Like design is such a specific discipline that people imagine what design is and they think that design is all this like magic or artistic thing that come out of nothing and we build something brilliant, right? Like, which is not true. We all know that design is a lot of like research, is a lot of like understanding the users. It’s a lot of iteration and, you know, polishing things over time. It’s learning and it’s not a recipe that you can replicate every time or you solve this problem before you can just apply it again. It’s not, like that.

So just having the time to, and the patience to really like be open to any type of question to be open to bring people to your process and make them part of your process. Those are the things that worked for me so far. And I think I will definitely continue to do and try to learn new ways to do too.

Peter: In these past two years at Neon, how much of your time have you had to spend educating about design? It sounds like you haven’t had to do much evangelizing. The sense I got when you mentioned the agreement that you had, like, even before you joined, was that they were bought in to at least what they thought design was, but it also sounds like since you’ve been there, there’s been a process of helping them understand all the things that design could be delivering: the distinct values, the processes and approaches. Is that something you’re having to spend a lot of time communicating and expressing, or is it, I could also imagine it’s something that you’re, like, you know what, we’re going to do what we do. You know, I’m not going to try to impose my value system, my processes on you. I’m here to deliver outcomes. Tell us what we’re trying to drive towards and we’ll get there. Like how do you navigate just how much to share about design?

Educating others on design

Koji: Yeah, on the first part, yeah, I’m privileged because I have a CEO who is, you know, into design. He was a designer for some years, so he really cares about quality design and building something that works well for our users, which is great.

And he really understand users. He talked with the users every day, pretty much. So I’m privileged in that area of not being needing to be an advocate for design, which is totally different from Google, by the way, which is an engineering driven culture, and we had to do this all the time.

Now for education, I think, like, as a designer, I saw myself doing this my whole career from an IC at Google and talking with, like, a PM that just joined Google and never worked with a designer to today with VPs that really didn’t have much contact with design that much in the past. And I would say it’s going to be our second nature for a couple of years still. The way, I think it’s been kind of helpful is to have someone on design ops or a group of people on design ops helping to build that, you know, internal training slash communication slash education about design.

So we have materials on onboarding, like, whenever someone joined a company, everybody goes through the same process and we have a presentation about design. We have, you know, internal trainings about accessibility and trainings for our team too, just to make sure that they’re level those skills and we continue to grow in specific areas. So right now we have a small team on design ops that takes care of all this internal education. And that helped me a lot.

Jesse: I’m really intrigued by the fact that you have considered these educational activities an extension of the mandate of operations. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I do think that it’s hard to bring people along with processes if they don’t understand the thinking that goes into them.

You know, you were talking about the challenge of leveling up your cross functional partners in their awareness, in their sophistication, in their understanding. And I work with so many leaders who get frustrated by these relationships, and they get frustrated by the fact that nobody else understands design as well as they do, and nobody else has as sophisticated an understanding of what makes good design as they do.

And my response to that is always like, you’re the design leader, you should be the one who has the most sophisticated understanding of design in the room. But there is a certain skill set in bridging that gap with people who don’t have that level of sophistication. So the ops team is running all of this stuff on your behalf to help drive this awareness, drive this sophistication of understanding. Where do you step in?

Koji: One of the things that we started doing, and this is a theme in my career, is to give visibility to research. Giving this ability to research, not in a way of like, oh, here’s a research team, this is what they’re doing, but more like, here are users. We’re talking with them this week, this is what we learned. Or, hey, tomorrow we are talking with users, anybody in the company can join and watch us talking with them.

Or you know, we’re doing this research trip end of the year. All the VPs and execs are invited and we’re going to a specific part of Brazil and we’re talking with our users and hearing their pains. This is something that first time I did this was at Google when I was working with emerging markets and I had a team and as you can imagine, you know, very diverse.

I have people in U.S. who were never had the experience of living in a third world country. So I took all the VPs, directors to the field to talk with the users in a favela in Brazil. So that was such a, you know, eye opening moment because they saw with their own eyes and they started to have their own insights of like, how are we going to solve this problem? then we did the same one work at Lyft. Twitter. We did some of that, but because we had like the lockdown moment. We didn’t have in person. And now if neon we’re doing that same work to bring, you know, the company closer to the users, not only products or design or engineers, but in general, the company to hear firsthand What the users care about, you know, their struggles, their feedback and so on and so forth.

So that helps a lot to just bring that shared knowledge and the shared goal of solving specific challenges. And I see people going on and commenting and saying like, Oh, I saw that video. Like, I think we can help in this way or that way, you know, so it becomes a simple thing you can do that I think is really powerful.

Equitable design

Peter: There is some critical commentary within design and user experience around a certain kind of colonial mindset, right? Extracting understanding from them. Building something to sell it back, where power dynamics can be fraught, right, in terms of the people who are showing up, wearing nice starched shirts, and the people they’re talking to… not, and I’m wondering how you think about this, how you navigate this, how you help others.

Maybe first at Google, because I can imagine there were a lot of folks in Mountain View who really wouldn’t know how to show up. It’s probably less of an issue at Neon since that seems to be the intent of the company to begin with. But something I think many of us have learned over the last three or four years is, to approach these circumstances with a much greater degree of sensitivity and awareness than, at least, Jesse and I had 20 years ago when we were starting doing this work.

And I’m wondering how you think about this how you make sure that like those dynamics feel equitable and not at odds or where one group showing up with just so much more power than any other.

Koji: I love that question. So, as you can imagine for me as being a Latino here, that’s a very important topic for me. I feel like the only way to do that in a fair game is by having a very diverse team. And as much as possible to have representatives of that specific community in your team.

I’m saying as possible because of course like if you’re doing research in a favela, hopefully you’re not hiring someone that you’re not being able to pay a fair salary to be able to move on to a better housing, you know. But, you have a lot of people who came from you know, very humble backgrounds.

And my feeling is that, and myself included here, I think that experience for me kind of made me feel way closer to the problem. And I think there’s a difference between, I always say this, looking at a report and just saying, Oh, this is what they feel. That’s a problem. Versus, like, being there once and really, being in that type of situation, let’s say living in a favela, for instance, knowing the violence, knowing how it is to wake up every day and not having clean water, versus just reading that in a document. having people from diverse backgrounds in your teams. It’s a qualitative level to that lived experience that it’s very hard to capture by just doing research.

And that’s what I’ve been trying to do every time I join a team that is working in specific communities, is to have that diversity embedded in the team, which is easier said than done, that’s what I would say it’s something that I strive for.

Jesse: I notice that frequently when you talk about the value that your teams deliver, you’re talking about it in terms of customer insight. And really connecting product strategy to the patterns that you’ve discovered among your users. And it’s interesting because these insight driven practices are kind of a little bit up in the air these days. Product teams are building increasingly robust research practices. Design teams are often being asked to set aside all of that insight gathering stuff and focus on optimizing for delivery. What do you see as kind of where this is headed for the role of insight in design, in design teams and in design’s value proposition?

Koji: Again, I feel I’m lucky because, you know, my team is design, research, and content. So you know, we own that whole spectrum.

Jesse: Right.

Koji: But one thing that I would say is that with research, our goal is also democratize internally, by one, giving visibility, but also training people to do research. Because we feel that in the end of the day, we want everyone to be able to talk with users.

I think there’s always the question of bias, of course, like if you’re building something, you’re biased and you’re asking a specific question that may be biased. But in the end of the day, it’s inevitable at this point with the market, how people are coached to be PMs, for instance, they’re asked to be talking with users.

So it’s better to have that with some training that not you just, like, do that recklessly. So that’s one thing.

The other thing to me is, I think it’s my duty as the leader of the organization to push my team and work with my peers to make sure that my team has a space to not just be pixel pushers, right? Like, I keep saying we’re strategic partners. design is not just pixels. There’s so much more about it. And yes, we should deliver fast. And I think in the end of the day, that’s what the business needs are, right? Like, and that’s why sometimes it’d be just, like, focus on the execution and do it.

But we also are not here just to design the surface, right? Like there’s way more beyond that. So it’s not an easy conversation, but again, I would urge people who are looking to join a new company to not let that discussion just go over after they join, but do this before. ‘Cause when you do that before, then you’re able to identify, like, is this the right place for me? You know, if enough good leaders are not you know, accepting places where design is being reduced to pixels, then I think there’s maybe some hope.

Peter: You’ve mentioned a few times to understand the nature of the company that you’re joining, and that your values are aligned, and you did talk about having an agreement, I think, as part of the conversation when joining them.

But what was it specifically about Neon that you were connected to that you felt you could kind of go all in on. What was that? And how did you realize that?

Koji: A few things. One, I was doing a lot of free mentorships during the pandemic. Mostly with underserved communities, end up doing a lot for Brazilians. And I felt like, Oh my God, I wish I could do this full time because, you know, it feels good to get back to the community that I came from. So that was the first thing that I had in my mind.

Second thing is, when I start to talk with the CEO and CEO was a person who hired me. He had two things in his head. One was like, I want to redesign, rebuild this thing from scratch, because this is five years old and I want you to join and just rebuild it.

And I’m not a person who is in love with just keep things going. I’m more like a transformational, like zero to one person. Like, I like to change things. And I think I’m better at this than just keep things going.

And then second, he really wanted me to rebuild the team culture, rebuild what is good design for the company, what means to launch a good quality product. We didn’t have a CPO for the most of the time I’m here. So I did some work as a, hybrid CPO, too. Like, the first PRD template was created by me, things like that, very operational things, to even more broad, like, how do we operate as a team together with PMs was also something that I helped to build a lot here.

So, yeah, I think it’s very rare to see a company of this size kind of wanted this amount of change, right? So it’s very specific of the space that Neon is in the Brazilian market.

The challenge of change

Peter: Even though it sounds like the CEO asked for change, other people in the organization asked for change, you mentioned you like being involved in these transformations, what I’ve seen is even when people ask for it, when faced with the reality of change, with the implications of change, you meet a lot of resistance, right?

So they’re coming to you, like, we want better design. You’re an amazing design leader who’ve worked at these great Silicon Valley companies. I’m sure the conversation was, bring us some of that Silicon Valley style design to what we’re doing here. And you might’ve told them ahead of time. Well, this is what it means.

But then when you’re in the mix and you aren’t going to launch something because it doesn’t meet a quality bar, or you need to change literally like how PM works with design, works with engineering from a process standpoint, you know, and they’re like, but this is how we’ve always done it and it’s worked fine.

And you have to tell them, well, but, in order for design to be its best, we need these changes that others are bringing, right? How has that gone? Or as a former guest said, change is not for the faint of heart. So how has that been navigating transformation, even with an organization that’s asked for it?

Koji: Yeah, I have a friend that tells me like, Oh, I think you like to suffer. Yeah, I mean, a lot of ambiguity and a lot of hard work. I would say that when you get to the reality of change, when you get to the reality of like, okay, this is where we’re going, even after presenting to the board and the board, you know, went back to the CEO and say, like, when we’re launching this, even after having that moment, I think we have like seven VPs, five different business areas. So it’s tough because it’s a relatively small company, but we’re already divided in different goals and all this business areas have different KPIs.

And guess what? Design KPIs are not there, so it’s not necessarily something that they would be rewarded for if they work in a redesign or in a new home screen, for instance, because they’re focused on credit cards or they’re focused on loans or other things. So, and I would credit, you know, the talk that Brian Chesky gave on the Figma event last year,

Jesse: hmm.

Koji: And to me, the most important part that he talked about there was not, PMs, that’s not the part that I really thought it was important for me, but designers working directly with engineers, those two paired up together, make things very quickly. And I got that video, I talked with the senior leadership and I said, like, we need to create a tiger team if we really want to build something new right now. Because I tried before, was to work with the different organizations within the company to build a new product, a new app. And it was so difficult because again, like, they’re rewarded by different KPIs organized by their business units and focus on the business side of things, but they’re not looking at, you know, the holistic view of what the product could be.

And honestly, in the end of the day, we just launched and we’re seeing improvements in pretty much all metrics. There’s some metrics that either are neutral or unclear, but there’s so much improvements in metrics that we didn’t thought about in the beginning because, you know, when we’re moving so many pieces together with a redesign the impact is huge. It’s not just one specific area.

But, in the end of the day, we end up creating this tiger team. It started with design only, we got front-end engineers, who were pretty much prototypers in the beginning, just building like a usable prototype, but without back-end. And then later, we got the back-end joining the Tiger team. And that’s where we rebuild the app. Some parts, very important parts of it from login to home screen to onboarding. And slowly that is helping a lot of the other teams to look at this new surface and to look at it as a new bar and change their own flows.

Jesse: What’s one question that’s on your mind a lot these days as a design leader.

Koji: Wow, so many questions, trying to pick one. I love design and I love the umbrella of what’s under design with all this gen AI things, all the change to 2D and potentially changing to 3D in the future for design.

I’m very curious about, like, Where are we going in terms of organizations, in terms of specialties, like, you know, will content design change? Will research change? Will product design be more focused on specific areas? Where are we going terms of future, in terms of even visual design, instance, which is something that I would say for me personally, like, I when I got into UX, I kind of negated visual design a lot. kind went against visual design a lot. Like, yeah, visual design is something that I don’t care about because, know, the whole user experience more important.

Now I think we’re seeing that visual design is having coming back. It’s been very hard to actually find good visual designers in the market. I’m also curious if we’ll have another, separation again of visual design roles versus interaction design roles like we had in the past. There are so many unknowns for me in the space right now. There’s so many changes going on right now. And I think that excites me and makes me a little bit nervous at the same time.

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

Koji: Thank you so much. Very happy to be here. Appreciate it.

Peter: Yes, thank you. This has been great.

Jesse: Koji where can people find you on the internet if they want to connect with you?

Koji: Alright, so I think the best way to find me is LinkedIn right now. So if you look up for Koji Pereira you will find me there, to post sometimes and where my business profile is right now. And yeah, I think that’s pretty much it at this point.

Jesse: All right. Thank you.

For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.