Evolution of a Design Organization and the Importance of Integrating Innovation

Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: On today’s show, Anne Pascual, VP and Head of Design for European fashion e-commerce giant Zalando, joins us to talk about driving innovation in a mature product category, the differences between leading design for an agency and leading design in-house, and creating a culture of trust at scale.

Peter: Thank you so much for joining us. Just to start off, it would be great to hear what you’re up to. I know you’ve been at Zalando for a while, but tell us a little bit about your journey and how you’ve arrived at where you are.

Anne: Yes, I’m happy to do so. Great to be here. So yeah, I’ve been with Zalando now over seven years. My current role is SVP Product Design, Marketing and Content. I actually started working with Zalando already nine years ago. At the time I was an executive design director at IDEO. And had the pleasure to consult Zalando, building up an innovation team, and then work basically side by side with Zalando for two years until I made the decision, okay, I want to now join and build a team from the ground up.

So I started off building up the product design team, which at the time, there were only two handful of UX designers, quite low design maturity in general, but a thriving startup with incredible growth rates. And so the first couple of years, I really focused just on product design and matured the team to a decent size and build different leadership layers, processes.

Then I expanded my role to also look after brand marketing and content creation, which is super exciting. As those are adjacent fields, but also very different fields and job families. So I’ve been learning a lot about that, but really the reason for this role is that obviously in order to build the brand and a coherent, compelling customer experience, those parts are super important when you work for the largest fashion e- commerce player in Europe. These journeys are quite intertwined. How you discover the brand, how you look at an ad, how you think more in general about fashion, and then come to the app to explore the assortment through content, through imagery, that then gets produced either in-house or sourced from brands, creators, or third party vendors.

So yeah, my job is definitely super interesting and I keep learning every day.

Designing for fashion experiences

Jesse: Fashion is a really interesting category for design because design has, I think, a special impact in that category on brand perception and perception of value and luxury and things like that. And I’m curious about how that’s come into play as you’ve been building up a design function for a giant fashion ecommerce retailer. 

Anne: Yeah. I mean, luckily I’m also personally very passionate about fashion. I think it’s a super interesting way to express identity, to communicate, to innovate. So I’ve been always kind of interested in fashion as an individual. And when I got to work with Zalando, it became clear that fashion is this really important vehicle for people to express themselves connect with others.

And it’s also a super interesting industry. Where you see on one hand, large established fashion brands that in the beginning didn’t have any real connection to digital channels. And that’s where Zalando came in to really become the first big player in Europe to help those brands get their assortment online and make this access to fashion very easy and convenient.

This is also what Zalando became known for in the first couple of years. And design at the beginning obviously played a role in making that experience very seamless and trustworthy because, you know, people still had to get their head around how do I buy a pair of shoes or dress online? And, I’m comfortable returning it if it doesn’t fit.

So initially design is really about making the functional aspects of e-com work and doing a decent job in representing fashion through the right image representation, the right product detail information, but obviously also the whole transactional flow of adding something to the checkout and cart.

Now, what’s been super interesting is that from moving beyond just designing for these functional aspects I believe that also our team became more and more important to provide strategic guidance on where the overall experience should evolve to. And especially over the last couple of months and years, we’ve seen how fashion desires a much more emotional experience than maybe we have been providing until now.

So yes, the transactional part runs super smooth and very successfully. But if you look around, fashion is very much related to inspiration, and these days there’s a lot of it happening on social media. So now the design team, not only the design team, is focusing a lot around how do you get across these elements around storytelling and entertainment. How do you make the experience around fashion a lot more emotional? And less transactional and functional. 

So yes, you’re absolutely right. This is exactly kind of the interesting design opportunity here to, on one hand, fulfill those functional needs around the shopping experience and the product as the garment and piece of clothing. And on the other hand, to be able to convey the stories behind the products, the stories behind the brands, and also really connect with our customers on an emotional level. And that’s not always easy, but super, super interesting.

Innovating in e-commerce

Jesse: I think that for a lot of people who work outside e-commerce, but we are all, of course, e-commerce users, e-commerce as a category feels very mature, right? We’ve had now 30 years of e-commerce best practices to draw on. And it’s interesting. because it sounds like what’s happened for you and your team is the realization of the need to go beyond those best practices to reintroduce design innovation into a category that doesn’t really feel like it has a lot of room for innovation, and I’m curious about how that’s come about and how you’ve gone about it as a design team. 

Anne: Yeah. I mean, you’re absolutely right. We’ve done extensive work to actually map all the jobs to be done along this purchase journey. And they’re quite clear around, you know, finding an item, making a decision, understanding what you’re getting, how it may actually fit compared to other items and your style and then receiving it, potentially returning it or, keeping it.

So you’re right. There’s not like that many new problems to discover. At the same time, there’s still some fundamental problems to be solved. One, for instance, being size and fit. So it’s still one of the biggest challenges in comparison to the physical world, to know if something will fit me. And we have a dedicated team that’s been working for over many years now to identify different ways to provide size advice and recommendation. But also help customers build a size profile on Zalando and, through their usage, get better recommendations. 

Now on the innovation side, what’s interesting is obviously that this industry is under fundamental changes, or going through fundamental changes, and there’s a few of them that now have really informed also our most recent strategy update.

One is this generational shift that many of our future, near-term customers have been growing up now with the Internet and smartphones and for them shopping in itself is of very different nature than maybe for our generation. We’ve been kind of happy to browse a category tree and I would say more of a warehouse-like UX, but this new generation has very different expectations and is used to different ways to discover what they like.

The second big shift, and potential for innovation, it’s obviously also technology– Gen AI now introduces totally new ways to interact with customers. Being at conversational UIs, but also how you generate content, and that obviously is super, super exciting to see. 

Then there is obviously also the environmental shift that we are all very aware of, and that requires the whole industry to adapt. Thinking about how to provide the right information about a garment, how to give customers better choices to understand the environmental footprint. And this is something that obviously not a single player, even a large one like ourselves, can design in isolation, but it’s about working closely with authorities, other fashion brands, to really establish new standards and new ways to do justice to these big challenges for the industry as such.

So, there is a lot to innovate around and that one particular part that I’m focusing on in my current role is around inspiration and entertainment. So how do you create a completely new experience for customers to discover fashion and lifestyle, and to spend quality time on Zalando to learn more about fashion, fashion brands and products, but also to enjoy different ways to participate and play a more active role in this experience. 

So right now, as I said, shopping is very one directional and very transactional, but if you think about it, it’s by nature, a lot more social and a lot more entertaining than purely adding something to your cart. So we want to really crack content in commerce.

And yes, several social media platforms have tried to enter commerce, have failed. In other parts of the world, they’re extremely successful doing it. And we believe that we’re very well positioned to now conquer this next era and to make that seamless transition from discovery to purchase much, much easier than anywhere else.

Peter: This move, to go beyond transactions and towards experience, feels natural for a design organization, but often design organizations aren’t given that permission or freedom to explore. There’s too much needing to prove themselves that often happens.

And I’m wondering you know, you’ve been there for a while now. So what have you done to bolster your team’s credibility in these ways, so that they’re given opportunities to try things that might be, I don’t know if risky is right, but say experimental?

And how are you working with the other parts of the business, right? I’m assuming design isn’t, you know, doing these experiential experiments on their own. So what is that like in terms of your connection with others to realize these opportunities?

Anne: Yeah. By any means, the design team is not the only team to work on these ideas. And indeed it’s, much more of a cross-functional growth vector for many parts of the business that believe that there’s a new era and a new frontier to conquer for us.

The first 15 years of Zalando were very much focused on growth, and we know those sets of customer problems to solve for, and to be able to scale and to optimize for speed. And there, one of the biggest strengths of Zalando is probably the analytical part of being very data-centric.

But also being really good at, you know, the commercial parts of the business, the strong brand relationships and, by now, being the largest fulfillment network for fashion across Europe. So these are kind of the, I would say, business and operational backbone and infrastructure that has been built.

When it comes to the design team, I think we were very much focused on adding a layer of customer experience that would be very robust and very solid, so to say, and very scalable. And I think that, you know, helped scale the business specifically throughout the years of the pandemic. That were obviously we were very fortunate to go through as a business.

Establshing an innovation practice

Anne: And then always keeping an eye on what’s next. So this team that I initially led when I started working with Zalando, this innovation team always remained, not at the same size, but it’s been always part of the design team. To pick up topics that organizationally would not have yet a permanent team staffed or a clear mandate and mission defined so that we could pick up some of these signals and explore them further.

And that gave the design team permission to not be fixed or constrained by structural boundaries and keep exploring. But to be fair, I think this focus on experiences is something that was rather led by the vision of our co-founders who have shaped now the strategy for many years, and were also very convinced about this path.

And they now lean on senior leaders like myself and many others to really articulate: how do we realize this vision and what are the different capabilities that we need to have on the team? And one of them is product design and specifically also this element around storytelling and content.

And so I think it’s really a combination of having built a solid foundation, a mature team, and process working very closely with product management and engineering on eye level, being very much aware of the core business and also the affordances of running that day to day, but making room for innovation and investments in further growth areas.

So yeah, it’s probably been, you know, a couple of attempts to also really define what these new areas are. But I’m very happy to say that we have found a really good way to now structurally and systemically work through some of these opportunities.

Peter: And am I right in understanding that part of your design team is a like small innovation function? 

Anne: Yes 

Peter: Interesting. I would love to hear more about what the makeup of that is, because a lot of design orgs try to either have a strategy or innovation team, and it often doesn’t work because they’re not connected with the day to day.

And so they do these explorations and it’s green field and blue sky and very exciting. But then when you try to productize it, it doesn’t go anywhere. And so I’m wondering how you’ve been able to set this team up where it sounds like it’s actually gotten traction, and the sense making and explorations they’re doing do get brought into the broader fold.

Anne: The first advice is don’t call it the innovation team. You don’t do that team a favor because no matter what size a company is, I don’t think you will find someone who says, I don’t do innovation, right? So don’t make it like this exclusive elitist little team that gets to work just on the fun idea so to say. 

And again, going back to how I started working with Zalando nine years ago, it was a team that was quite distanced from the core and was the satellite team that had minimal connection to core business. And that had some advantages. Blue sky. You don’t feel the pressure of the day to day. You really think you know, white piece of paper and you kind of have this freedom, right? 

What I personally really started lacking though is exactly that thrive for impact because many, many of the ideas that the team came up with, they were not wrong, but it was really, really hard to implement them and to scale them. If you wouldn’t have access and integration to the rest of the team, which was also ultimately why I wanted to join because it was also quite frustrating after a while to feel like you had the right ideas, but no means to act upon them.

Now the studio team, as we call it, it’s nature probably shifted every year. Every year we’ll be sitting down and thinking, okay, what’s the most important thing we need to solve as Zalando? How can we help? What are the specific skills we have? What are specific topics we can do? What are specific projects we can do to really advance on the most important topics? And we never, from then on did that in isolation, but we partnered up with other parts of the business, in many and most cases with other product teams to really a learn about what are the biggest feasibility challenges to consider, but what are also the critical business inputs and requirements to understand better.

And then most importantly, how do we identify the future owners of these ideas that would basically be part of the process. And then really take on some of those ideas to implement them.

That worked in many, some instances. In many instances, it didn’t. But the team, again, it’s a small team of now, I would say, five to eight people. And the makeup would be design strategist with very strong actual hard skills. So the deliverables were things that could be implemented by an engineer. And even now the team is driving large part of the roadmap definition and the solution designs we’re working on. Why? Because there’s really no other way to make very complex ideas work across many different teams if you’re not literally embedded and feeling part of the rest of the team. So it’s sort of a ring fence team but really it works side by side with all the other product designers. 

Jesse: I noticed in the way that you talk about it that design seems to have a pretty significant influence on, really, product strategy. And I’m curious about a couple of things. I’m curious, first of all, who is your boss? And secondly, what is your relationship to a product management or product oversight function? 

Anne: Yeah. My current boss is the co-CEO and co founder Robert Gentz. And my most important peer is the SVP product management Andrew Watts who joined Zalando four years ago. And that was actually amazing, because with such a strong counterpart who also understands and appreciates the value of design, you can make a lot of things happen together.

And so I have to really mention and give credit also to the VP product design who now runs the product design team on a day to day basis, also former IDEO-er, so that I can also add a focus on additional topics like marketing and content creation. So just want to make that super clear that without Tim I couldn’t do my job.

And again, I think it’s this ability to get your hands dirty, get things done, work on prototypes in a short amount of time. But then also be able to sponsor very large, very complex implementation projects over a couple of months where even Tim, the VP product design, is the main sponsor although it could be a very technical project.

So. I think it’s about this deep understanding of both the business and the technology that allows design to play this influence. And preparing for this podcast, I was reflecting on the journey, you know, over the last 20 years to be in design. I think that’s been the most rewarding part. To feel like because I’m now so deeply embedded in the business and in the leadership, it’s so much more exciting to see what design can do versus maybe being part of a design only team, or maybe a much more design-focused organization where you’re just one of many. But in my case, I know it’s one perspective that is very unique and very different that the team brings. It’s highly embedded and integrated and can hopefully make a big difference in many, many different ways.

Design consulting vs design in-house

Peter: You mentioned your head of product design is also from IDEO. Your background is IDEO. I know you’ve been at Zalando for a while now, but you also spent a long time at IDEO. Jesse and I spent a long time at Adaptive Path, so we understand the design consulting space.

I’m curious, what your experience was, shifting from operating within a design agency, design consultancy, and then coming in house. And I suspect you have motivations similar to me, which is to try to bring a lot of the good things about design agencies and how they work and the quality they drive.

But you also recognize you can’t just put an agency inside of a company and call it a day, right? There’s a different way of working. So what has that transition been like for you? What have you done to maintain whatever ideals you might have had in an environment like IDEO, but within an enterprise like Zalando?

Anne: Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of things that I still apply day to day that I learned throughout my time at IDEO. One is how to deal with ambiguity. The fact that you are being tasked to solve something you don’t really understand fully, but you’re able to grasp and work through and decompose is something super, super important.

Even when you work over a couple of years in an established environment, and also your role becomes more and more familiar. I think this ability to also seek ambiguity and understand where there is an opportunity is something super, super valuable that I still, use from back in the days. 

The second aspect that I also still keep using and that, you know, comes from having worked in that environment is tangibility.

The need to come up very quickly with very concrete ideas because you have limited time to get across, you know, what you want to get across in terms of design opportunities and being able to make that tangible and through that. great conviction and believe on the other side that this is where we could go. This is where we could take the product or the service. 

That’s something extremely powerful and much more effective than doing just a PowerPoint or having yet another meeting or a discussion. 

So, and then the third aspect that I also still appreciate thinking back about that time is resilience overall, around changes in scope, changes in timeline, changes in deliverable, changes in team members, changes in stakeholders. Like you never know what to expect when you work on a project or program on the consulting side. And that really sharpens your tools, but also your communication skills and also your ability to collaborate. So those were the things that I really appreciated and took with me. 

Now shifting into the more corporate world, the few things I had to learn there was, in general, how to deal with complexity, because, you know, working in a small project team, you know your four other peers and you work with them day to day. And that’s it. In order to get something done in a large company, you have to understand how you navigate complexity organizationally, technically, business-wise.

And there’s a lot more inputs you have to take into consideration. The second part that I really love and that is obviously not always the easiest: leadership. The amount of decisions you need to make, the amount of change you need to manage, the amount of translation around what the strategy is, what the roadmap is, that requires a lot of leadership that I don’t think I ever had to apply when I was on the consulting side.

And the third thing I really had to build muscles around is in general execution. So being quick in decision making, being clear around certain priorities thinking through what could go wrong. thinking through who needed to be involved, what needed to be true, what could help the other side.

So execution is just something that yeah, requires very different muscles than if you only work on the strategy side. 

Jesse: I wanted to ask a similar question and maybe you don’t actually have any additional answers here. But I’m also curious about because you spent such a long time as a consultant. You were at IDEO for more than a decade. What ideas about the practice you might’ve had to unlearn or leave behind as you were transitioning out of consulting into the in house environment? 

Anne: I mean, I would say that what’s true in particular for IDEO and what IDEO became famous for was a lot of the qualitative insights that, don’t get me wrong, are still super, super important. But I think now looking at how important data is and how important KPIs are, I think it’s less about unlearning, but just learning full steam and continuously around that part.

Unlearning, maybe it’s also this endless amount of opportunity where, when you work in an organization and in a business, resources are not endless, and there’s business objectives. So at some point it’s about, you know, really assessing what is the most important thing to focus on. Even though I remain super curious and I remain to see lots of different new things, it’s also important to provide stability, continuity, and focus to the teams. 

The other thing I think I had to unlearn is that as a consultant, you’re very much trained to listen to the stakeholder and to kind of help align the different perspectives, but being in a leadership role myself, it’s even more important for me to have a perspective and for me to be able to, you know, debate and disagree. And that’s not always what we’re used to, because we start with this empathy for every different perspectives in the room. And we try to, you know, really listen to everyone as a consultant. So that’s also something that I think I have to unlearn a bit.

Peter: As you were reflecting, I found myself thinking about how this podcast is about design leadership and navigating the space of design leadership. And I’m curious what you found to be the difference in design leadership as a concept within IDEO where it sounds like you were like an executive creative director, at least quite senior, and now as a VP and then SVP of design in house. Does design leadership mean different things in these different environments or have you found it to be the same thing?

Anne: Yeah, 100%. I would say at IDEO, being a design leader meant, in this particular role of a design director, to raise the bar, right? To raise the bar on the thinking, on the ideas, on the quality of the work, and to push the team to think bigger. 

Now internally design leadership is more about accountability. What is my contribution? What is my team’s contribution to the overall business? And are we doing the best we can to accelerate, to improve, to optimize what we are doing? So that is a very different way I would define the aspects of design leadership in both instances.

Scaling everything (including yourself)

Jesse: One of the challenges that you touched on, as you were talking about making the transition from the consulting role to the in house role, was just simply the challenge of scale, bigger team, bigger problems, you know, bigger stakeholder community, just everything operating at a larger scale, everything operating at, as you pointed out, much too large a scale for you personally to engage across everything.

And I’m curious your thoughts on strategically scaling your team and especially strategically scaling yourself as a leader and how you’ve gone about that. 

Anne: Yeah, that is a really good one. I would start with maybe something surprising which is culture. I think from the beginning, because I was used to such a strong culture coming from IDEO, it was very important to build a team that felt more like a community and not in the soft type of way, but more in terms of the level of trust and safety, psychological safety, and also the level of collaboration and support the team would give each other, because that allowed everyone to raise the bar, to move faster and to really go for the best outcomes. 

On top of that, it was also about setting the right standards who to hire. So how do you run hiring interviews? How do you assess the seniority of a designer? And then how do you also keep up with type of talent that you are looking for, which was something super, super important.

Then obviously as a third thing, processes, to kind of have the right rituals in place, design reviews weekly check ins, all of that.

And then fourth, luckily, I think we saw a lot of great things happening on the effectiveness of designs teams and the scalability of them through the introduction of design systems, or even design operations, and then also just the rise of new design tools that would make it a lot easier to collaborate as a design team, with tools like Figma, Miro.

And then, yeah, being lucky to have a really great leadership team that is able to really drive things forward, that share your vision. That are equally equipped with stakeholder management skills and great craft. And that can, you know, run on their own and identify with a bigger vision.

Jesse: One of the issues with building up a trustworthy team in this way is getting the business to trust that team especially as, you know, you have a mandate that extends beyond things that are readily measured. You have some somewhat more qualitative things that you and your team are on the hook for. You can develop a certain amount of personal trust with your counterparts at the level in the organization that you are.

But again, you can’t be everywhere and you can’t be in all the meetings and you can’t be engaged with every stakeholder. So I’m curious about how do you support your team in helping them develop trusting relationships that enable them to deliver on these things for their stakeholders. 

Anne: Yeah. I mean, I also want to make sure it doesn’t sound like everything is easy and always going smoothly, but again, we’ve been lucky to, as I said, build up maturity of the design team and also the product and tech organization over many years. And we have had very strong tech leaders who have had many years of experience, for instance, at Amazon and brought a lot of great things to the team that allowed everyone to work better together and understand, okay, what are we trying to do here? 

So we, for instance, write PR FAQs. We go through the solution design phase, and then the execution phase. And so we’ve been spending a lot of time a couple years ago to really define what is each other’s roles at what step of the process and who is at which time leading or following. And it’s been very clear that, for instance, in this very initial phase, this PR FAQ phase, product is leading and design is supporting. Design is supporting by helping with ideas and research and insights and sketches, maybe some initial visuals but really giving, you know, the front seat to product. 

On the second stage, solution design, it’s where design picks up the baton and takes the lead and really going really, really deep on the user journeys and the different features and, you know, how things would come together.

And then the third stage where engineering is leading and driving the execution. We also introduced some really great project management that would establish great drum beats, great documentation. We invested quite a lot in written documentation which, you know, helped everyone to have the same understanding of certain problems we were trying to solve, created a lot of transparency that maybe otherwise gets a bit lost when you only do it in workshops.

Maybe during the pandemic, we did that a little bit too much and we had to rebuild trust more from a, you know, personal interaction perspective over the last two years. But even the fact that when you come to the floor and the building where the design team sits, like they are embedded then across different parts of the buildings to really work side by side with the other product teams.

Yes, they have a home base, but it’s this commitment to the respective areas that they work with day to day that there’s no idea of like, oh, this is, you know, this other team. But it’s really about touching different parts of the experience together with product and engineering.

Peter: I’ve been doing some work with European clients, one in particular where it’s totally remote.

And one of the challenges that we’re talking about is how do we collaborate better remotely, asynchronously? And I’m wondering how you guys are working, collaborating. Are you remote? Are you hybrid? Are you part time hybrid? What have you found or where have you guys landed in terms of what’s working well to support the kind of collaboration that you want to do?

Anne: Yeah, we have a hybrid model in place. And that means split of 40, 60 if I’m not mistaken. So 40 percent onsite and 60% remote, with lots of flexibility built in when exactly you are on site which is defined by what we call team charters so that the different leaders can decide, Hey, what’s the mode that works for us?

It could be, you know, we all come for specific dates, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is a very almost common one. The other ones say, let’s come together during that week and spend the whole time together. So it’s flexible and it works I think for the design team and again, you know, there’s obviously lots and lots of work happening that I’m not directly involved in, but we have, for instance, what we call the weekly design review, and that is encouraged to take place in person. Why, because it’s a lot easier to look at designs and look for, you know, cues and like body language around like, Hey how would that work?

We also try to print out more of the work again, because it’s so much easier when you have things up on the wall and can point at things. So, you know, the old school way kind of and then obviously we still have people sometimes on the screen that dial in from other tech hubs and where we can seamlessly have them look at the Figma file and equally leave comments to ensure there’s an inclusive way to moderate and host the session. And then, I think in general, outside of these important rituals, it’s really about having a feeling for how the community is doing, how much energy there is, and being able to bump into each other and grab lunch together. I mean, all these important things that we missed so dearly during the pandemic, but that make every team work much, much better together.

Peter: Kind of related. So you mentioned teams are the ones deciding when they come together. And I’m making an assumption here that those are product teams, cross functional teams. But then you mentioned the design review and something that I see particularly scaled design organizations have challenges with, particularly the designers within those organizations, is the degree to which they are beholden to their cross functional product team, their squad or pillar or whatever it ends up being called in their organization, and their functional design team, and what that design team is trying to get done. And those things are not always aligned, right? There’s different modes of working, might be different OKRs. 

How are you helping the people in your org navigate what can sometimes feel like being beholden to two masters, their product team masters and their design team masters?

Anne: Yeah, I have to admit, I haven’t heard that many issues around that. Maybe… yeah, because I’m not aware and they still exist. That could be, but also because this model has been in place almost from the start. And it hasn’t been questioned and designers report into design and we have design leadership levels from what we call team leads, heads, directors, and VPs up to my role, really having a level of cohesion around the performance, the communication, the processes, but have equally this eye-level peer on the other side. And I think that helps a lot around escalations or dealing with friction or agreeing on Hey, maybe we should, you know, rethink this.

 

Peter: When you say the other side, is that primarily product? Is it like, so,a design VP has a product VP, and a design director has product director and it’s one to one?

Coming together as a product design team

Anne: Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And obviously, they have rituals as well, but then we have these moments where we come together as a, product design team. One thing actually that is super, super nice, I haven’t been in a long time, but if I go, I’m so inspired. It’s what we call the Campfire where we bring actually all product design from the entire company together.

So if I refer to the product design team until now, it’s basically everyone who works on the B2C side on the fashion app, but then we also have designers in B2B, we have an off price business and so there’s another, 50 people, 60 people joining on top of the big design team we have in B2C to really bring all their work together once a month.

So you get within an hour, a snapshot of what everybody is working on. And that’s super, super nice because you really appreciate the diversity of the work, the diversity of the designers but also through that, you achieve a lot of helpful rotation of ideas and people. So I think one reason why we’ve become such an attractive employer for design is that you have people to learn from and you have options and opportunities to grow into different roles and to work on different topics along the way.

So that’s been super, super nice and very effective to keep the work at a high level. 

Jesse: It seems to me that so many of these scaling challenges come back to having a leadership team underneath you that you can invest a lot of trust in so that you can turn your back on so many of these different aspects of it and focus on these higher level strategic priorities. And I’m curious about what you do to stay aligned with the folks who are directly underneath you, who are overseeing all of these aspects of design on behalf of the business. 

Anne: Yeah, I mean, maybe one thing to call out is that while I’m able to delegate a lot, and there’s a lot more work that other leaders are driving, there’s definitely a couple of topics where I’m deeply, deeply involved myself and where I do a lot of the actual thinking and the actual, you know, alignment myself.

So I think that is actually super important to stay grounded. And so up to the executive level, we’re all sponsors of projects and goals that require a lot of leadership attention day to day and being into the details. We have this leadership principle called fly high, dive deep. So being able to still keep in touch with the design details and the design decisions is super, super important.

And by now I may, you know, include what does that mean for marketing? What does it mean for content or what does it mean in general for some of our business priorities and goals that I think is super, super important to stay aligned because I could see how, if I wouldn’t do that, I would just lose touch and I would just, you know, come up with unreasonable ideas and unreasonable requests.

And I think this way, I think it’s much more natural to walk up to any design leader and, you know, work together on something as concrete as, you know, the next launch, or the next reduction of a customer defect that we discuss for instance, every week as part of a broader leadership group.

So alignment can only happen, I think, through the actual work and on the strategic level where the team needs to be super, super clear and as aligned with the rest of the organization, including commercial teams, including other parts to say we all understand where we are going, and we all use the same language. And we all contribute to some of those milestones that we define, for instance, on a yearly basis. I think that is the important ingredient of alignment. 

Taking initiative

Jesse: You mentioned that part of staying aligned with the team for you is having some things that you personally own and some initiatives that you personally drive. Are you generating your own initiatives for yourself? Or is this more a matter of assessing what the business is asking for and picking the things that you think are the places where you particularly are able to dig in and if so, what are your criteria? 

Anne: Yeah. I mean, I was just imagining how I would wake up one morning and say like, Oh, let’s start this initiative. I don’t think that would work. But back to, you know, picking up on the understanding of where the business is going, where the opportunity lies. 

So for instance, also by meeting with brand partners, understanding what they’re trying to achieve. And then being able to also take a request from the management board that says, Hey, can you please help define, explore what this opportunity could be like or, you know, here’s a couple of important signals we’re getting on the main business KPIs. How can we tackle it, be it customer life cycle management or ad revenue.

We have a retail marketing business to support. So those are the things that I pick up and that I work together with other leaders on, and then with staffing teams that are fully dedicated to making things happen. 

I do have obviously things that I then personally drive that maybe initially didn’t have an owner, but that I feel like I should do. So for instance two years ago, we acquired a media company called Highsnobiety. They’re globally known for identifying fashion trends and they’re a publisher themselves. And we started working with them just because they have these storytelling capabilities that we believe we have been missing and that we should invest further on and going through this process was in itself, super interesting. 

But then working with them side by side to identify what could be initiatives that help us to really develop those muscles. And that’s how end of last year we launched what we call Stories on Zalando. It’s the first content-first experience in our app, where we developed a content strategy and content franchises that we would scale very quickly within weeks to be able to publish stories three to five times per week. And that had to bring together lots of different teams across the business in content creation, and marketing, product design, but also obviously on the engineering side, to make happen. And obviously also on the assortment side, because we often talk about specific products and specific brands in those stories.

So working with colleagues on the fashion proposition side, as we call it, was super, super essential. And I, devoted a lot of time to make that happen. And for me to be able to, together with other design leaders, to think about what are the subtle paradigm shifts we want to introduce, like a video, short video format. And being able to anticipate what would that do for this transactional journey to bring in these stories. That was something that I was personally and have been, and still are, super personally passionate about. And quite, quite involved.

Peter: You’ve mentioned how you oversee not just product design, but brand and marketing design. And then you talk about content. I’m curious if anyone else besides maybe the CEO has the same breadth of purview that you do from true end-to-end customer experience.

I found when I was running design at Groupon, because I also had the brand design team, I knew more about what was going on across the experience than… my boss was the SVP of product, because they were limited in scope to that product experience. So I’m wondering if you really are like unique within Zalando, apart from maybe the CEO, in terms of really seeing an end-to-end experience that no one other, even executive might be aware of, and what are the implications of that breadth of perspective?

Anne: I don’t think it’s so unique to my role and mandate. If you think about other functional leaders like the SVP product management. Runs the entire e-com platform end to end. So, you know, knowing exactly how product data, customer data, checkout, all of that works is huge and important for all parts of the business.

The commerce team as we call it is really, really big because it includes all the partner services. So we also have a partner program, marketplace business that allows us to broaden our assortment that is massive in terms of technology and operations. In that remit is also the retail marketing organization, which is another big, big business unit.

So, I honestly don’t think necessarily that my role is that unusual, but I agree very broad when it comes to how to shape the customer perception. What makes the role still interesting, at times challenging, is that it’s not given that you have end to end control on all these different parts because obviously as a function, you receive a lot of the requirements from the different markets from the different parts of the commerce team. 

And so it’s, I believe, very different from, for instance, an organization like Airbnb, where you find a lot more centralization, simplify some of the decision making right away. And then the other aspect that is important to keep in mind is that the experience we built is very dynamic in terms of the different business steerings that you have in place.

So it’s a seasonal business where you have a lot of commercial activations happening. You also have the whole element of personalization, being able to cater to almost 50 million customers individually. 

So even if it sounds like, you know, there’s a lot of control and end to end influence, yes, and at the same time, there’s only as much that each individual is immediately influencing right away. That said, what’s super, super important in what we call mission and mandates is that each leader at a given seniority is very clear in terms of what are the KPIs you’re accountable for and how do you, even if lots of things are not in your control, are the ambassador of this KPI.

So that if something goes wrong, something develops differently, you can be the one who chases the root cause. So I think that’s also something that makes, I think, the whole work of working with other teams so important because ownership is super, super important to move the business forward.

Peter: What, what, what are, what are your KPIs?

KPIs for design

Anne: Yeah. So one part of my team is actually a tech team that runs our home, our launch screen when you open the app. So understanding how many customers open the app and spend time on Zalando. Right now we focus more on the views of these customers, but then also how quickly do we engage them? That is super, super important. 

Then it’s the amount of content creators that we have on the platform. So here you have the influencers, but it’s also, for instance, how many brand shops do we have where brands upload their own content. Some of those placements on home are sponsored placements. So understanding how much ad revenue is generated through those placements.

And then on the product detail page, it’s obviously, you know, the amount of product imagery or time to online when you look at individual SKUs per product which is also an important KPIs. So those are a few when it comes to the app experience.

And then on brand, it’s obviously brand awareness, consideration. Brand loyalty yeah, things like this. So it’s slow and fast moving KPIs that I’m accountable for.

Peter: You mentioned influencers and something I’m finding myself wondering about your organization is how you think about your user types, to be as kind of generic as possible. Just, it sounds like shoppers, there’s influencers, there might be merchants, maybe there’s others that I’m, there might be internal people.

Like what are the audiences that you are responsible for delivering these experiences to? And how do you navigate, kind of, that ecosystem of people and their various wants and how they come together in this platform.

Anne: I mean, I would distinguish maybe two aspects. One is like, who do you have in mind when you design experiences? So more on the kind of behavioral user types. And then obviously you have on the actual marketing more the definition around who do you target and what are the customers cohorts that you want to develop further, which is mainly defined by commercial teams in the different markets.

And then you’re right. There’s this dimension of like, who are the actual people using technology or interacting with it. And you already mentioned a couple. There’s on one hand the brand partners that can upload content. Then you have creators who we hire to submit and then there are internal teams, obviously.

So it’s definitely already quite a broad landscape, but I could also see how over the next coming years, it could even further broaden. Meaning, you know, what if we would allow our customers to create, upload content which is not something we’re immediately working on, but that could become interesting maybe over a couple of years. 

Jesse: What are you most curious about right now as a design leader? 

Anne: I’m most curious about this idea about speed, speed and quality. So we talk about this internally because when you reach a certain size and you run a very large business, then obviously things get more complex, et cetera. 

But if you go back to, you know, how can we accelerate our velocity and decision making, but then on the other hand, how do you also not jeopardize quality, quality in the experience or quality in the decision making? I think that’s a super interesting tension, and I’m super curious how I can get good at this, but also how, obviously, collectively we get good at this. 

And even beyond being part of an individual organization or company, I think it’s something super interesting on a societal level where I think we all got used to things moving so quickly, that it’s sometimes already overwhelming and we overlook, you know, what is the important part where we should slow down or where we should revisit and hold onto. 

So I think it’s one that is probably important, not just as a professional, but just in general, as a human being.

Jesse: Anne thank you so much. This has been great. 

Peter: Thank you.

Anne: My pleasure. 

Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet? 

Anne: I guess on the new Facebook called LinkedIn. Yeah in Berlin and on LinkedIn and obviously through the Zalando app. So if you want to see what I’m up to, please download Zalando and become a customer in Europe.

Peter: Excellent. I’ll do that when I’m in Europe. 

Take care.

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