40: The Cross-Trained Design Leader (ft. Rajat Shail)

Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: Hardware design, software design, package design, experience design. Rajat Shail oversees all of it for home automation company Vivint. Rajat joins us to share what he’s learned about managing design as a holistic function, the benefits and pitfalls of using design thinking training to engage executives, and what to do when your mandate is broader than your boss’s.

Peter: Rajat, thank you so much for joining us today.

Rajat: Thanks, Peter. Thanks for the invite. It’s good to see you and Jesse.

Peter: So we’re just going to start at the top, which is to better understand: who are you, what you do, current role, responsibilities, what it is that you’re up to these days.

Rajat: Great. I’ll give you a quick synopsis. I am currently leading the design team, user experience team, and the industrial design team and working very closely with the research and insights team here at Vivint, which is a home automation company, which recently got acquired by a Fortune 120 company called NRG, which is focused on delivering great energy solutions.

So we’re really looking at what we call a category of one where we’re looking at home automation along with energy combined, could be a really nice foray into how people live in the future in smart homes. A little bit about me. I started my design journey in India, I did my undergrad and masters in India in design. Worked there for a short time, moved to this country about 20 years ago, and went on a journey working for different companies like Motorola, Whirlpool, Honeywell, Resideo, Bose, and then most recently at Vivint.

My journey has been starting from being an industrial designer to getting to Institute of Design, Chicago, and focusing more on design methods and frameworks and strategy. Not practicing it as much because you know, when you just start, you’re at a certain elevation where you can’t really influence thought leadership at a very high level, but you can use those frameworks in your work and projects. But as I grew in my career, I not only started to focus more on training, you know, the VP/GMs on design thinking, but also started to, over a decade last decade, I started to make a transition into the digital space because there is no such thing as, you know, hardware design, digital design, it’s the end to end experience.

So, in order to be more holistic in creating a great customer value, I had to learn on the job from some of the best digital designers UI, UX. And for the last 10 years, I’ve focused more on digital, less on hardware, even though I manage hardware teams and I’m very familiar with that. So that’s been my journey.

Spanning the physical and digital

Jesse: What was the biggest shift in mindset for you as you made that transition from the focus on hardware into the digital?

Rajat: That’s a really great question, Jesse. I think I asked myself that question a lot, right? Like what, what makes me special?

The biggest shift was starting with imposter syndrome, saying, “Oh, I’m trying to play digital designer when I’m not really traditionally trained as one,” to starting to figure out that there are things I bring to the table as a traditionally hardware designer, which make me more adept at understanding things differently, which was, basically, in industrial design, people are looking at form and function together, right? And in digital, I noticed that there were a lot of subcategories around interaction design, visual design, usability, which was not something we typically divorce in hardware. So for me, when I started to look at interaction design, when I started to look at UI, UX, I was looking at the visual design and the interaction, mental models and the information architecture with the, holistic lens. And I found myself to be good at that because I could look at something that potentially looked complex, could be simplified with better visual design and vice versa, right?

So to me, I felt like I was realizing in meetings that there was something there that I brought to the table, which everyone doesn’t naturally have, because they’re so specialized, and of course, it was a journey and learning from the best interaction designers and visual designers to really understand the realization has also been that it’s not about digital or physical design.

It’s about what is the best way to solve a problem, right? And digital design, hardware design, just enablers in the journey to solve that. We focus a lot on touch points, but it’s really about the experience, the end experience and the most acute realization for me has been as little design as possible and sometimes really forcing myself not to design a piece of hardware and not to design a feature on a, product in a, like an app, which is not needed.

Peter: So a big reason we were interested in having you join us is that, as we’ve been talking with design leaders, they’re often purely software, maybe software and service, but you’re distinct in that you’ve maintained this connection with hardware, industrial design in I think for your last three jobs, right: Honeywell, Bose, and now Vivint.

You know, we’ve talked to other former industrial designers who have kind of let go of that. I work with one, a different design leader at an enterprise SaaS company who was trained in industrial design, but now works primarily in software and service. And I’m wondering how you’ve been able to maintain a career at this intersection of hardware and software.

And, were you motivated specifically to stay there or did it just happen?

Rajat: Yeah. Again, you’re asking me questions that I’ve asked myself a lot. Honestly, it would have been easier to move into digital in its entirety because of its complexity, but to be able to manage teams which are very hardware focused, which work still in a very very waterfall approach versus digital teams, which are working with very different set of engineers in a more agile approach, it would have been easier to focus on one, but I continue to realize that design is holistic. It’s integrated, right? Today’s experiences are physical. They are physical and digital coming together. If you do not look at this holistically, you start to see a disconnect in the work.

And it’s, apparent, like there are cases where I’ve seen the hardware is great, and I actually work for those companies, but the software is very poor; or the software is very robust, but the hardware touch point, the first point of delight of holding something in your hand which delivers additional experience, is just weak.

You cannot not look at these together. And of course my heart is in both the places. So it’s become something more of a natural approach for me now to switch on and off between the two teams and how they think. And I’ve also come to see that both sets of designers slightly look at design differently, right?

Their approach is different. And it always makes me chuckle when I see that fine difference on how an interaction designer solves a problem versus an industrial designer solves a problem. I sometimes feel really, really fortunate that I can see from both those sides and almost to the extent now that I’m able to see it from a mechanical engineer’s perspective as well as a software developer’s perspective very clearly.

Peter: You are leading design and I’m wondering what it means to lead these two flavors of design and how you maybe, do you need to show up differently with the digital side than you do with the hardware and industrial design side, or are you showing up the same and trying to help them understand that they have more in common than they thought?

But like, how does it affect how you lead when you have these teams that you’re responsible for that have different perspectives, preconceptions, different kind of starting points themselves.

Rajat: Yeah there is a difference both in the engineering development as well as the product leadership within both teams, right? There is a stark difference. One is focused on getting the word that I like the least, which is minimum viable product, into the market. The other one is rabidly idealistic about creating the greatest hardware and tools.

Neither one is wrong, because in digital it’s easier to go back and refine. In hardware, once you cut the tools, it’s very difficult to go back and make those continued improvements and refinements. So, that being said, I also like to believe in any product development, once you launch something, the followup becomes an afterthought, right? And, and so I like to use the word minimum lovable product as we use here at Vivint.

What is the best experience that we can give and then build on longterm value on that? So, changing this mindset, that let’s not just focus on the speed, but let’s focus on the quality of the experience which is loved, and at both those touch points is what’s been very different for me within the teams.

Jesse: You know, it’s interesting because what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard in a lot of organizations that are in the hardware business fundamentally, is that the software design is almost never actually unified with hardware design in this respect.

In a lot of cases, I hear from people on the software side who wish they had more interaction with, who wish they had more engagement with the industrial design side.

Apple famously tried to organize all of design under Jonny Ive on both the hardware and the software sides before deciding that that unification didn’t work. What do you think makes this unification work in these contexts that you’ve seen that other people are finding so challenging?

Rajat: They’re finding it challenging because the natural order of things is to create focus and speed, which frankly is achieved through a siloed approach. When you are in your lane and you’re moving fast, you’re not looking around. You achieve the speed that you need, but it also leads to a level of compromise on the quality, Jesse.

Building a culture of just ‘design’

Rajat: I don’t know how it played out at Apple. It was very interesting to hear Jonny Ive when he took over the interaction design team. What I’ve learned to do is, I think it starts from ground up, right? You really have to build a culture where designers are not calling themselves UX designers or industrial design. They’re just calling themselves designers or design thinkers.

I would extend that all the way to engineering and product because we train product folks to do good design thinking, right? So we need to be very, very open to anyone who is thinking creatively, thinking from a user-centered point of view to be addressed as a designer, right?

It comes down to very small, ground-up changes, making people sit together, okay? So they look over the shoulder and understand and learn every day from each other. Start to find these nice synergies and wonderful moments where they find that if I did this thing slightly different, the person who is connected to this experience can alter their design. So I’m finding those magical moments by forcing people to listen to each other.

It’s very easy for an industrial designer to switch off during a design review with the UX. And it’s very easy for a UX designer to switch off during industrial design. I often ask questions to people so they stay a little bit more aware. That’s at a design level.

At a leadership level, and this is a practice we started at Honeywell and I gained a lot from that, we don’t like to review designs. We like to review experiences. So let’s say you’re designing a soundbar, okay, for a home entertainment system. You don’t want to review the hardware of the soundbar, the industrial design or the UX.

You want to review the end to end experience. How is someone going to buy this? What is that? How is someone going to find out about the soundbar? And what is it about it that’s so unique? How are they going to purchase it? What is that purchase experience? And how is it better than everything else out there?

How are they going to get it shipped to them? What does their out of box experience feel like and then what does their first time user experience of setting it up feel like and then part of that is the hardware, part of that is the software install flow, and then finally how does it feel like when they start to use it for the first time and 60 days and what does long term value?

So we kind of lay this out in a long table, almost 20 feet long and we build all these touch points and prototypes and have our leadership go through it to say this is the product. The product is not what you’re holding in your hand. The product is that entire journey that customer is going to go through.

Which, frankly, Apple, I mean, I was trying to avoid using the Apple word, but Apple set the ground rules for it, right? Really well for us. And they’ve shown us the map and it’s shame on us if we don’t follow that, a good customer journey is what people enjoy more. For the longest time, people struggled that Apple’s features are not as good as maybe some Android phones.

That’s not the reason why people are buying Apple phones. People are buying Apple phones for the consistency of the ecosystem and knowing that they just need to learn once and rinse and repeat, right? At different touch points, whether they’re in the Apple store or the Apple website or on the help desk, right?

So I think that approach is what I am forcing leadership to look at holistically. And then you, you get a lot of help from different functions, because when you bring so many minds together people come up with newer ideas, which a traditional UX person would not have thought of, which a traditional marketing person would not have thought of, right?

The power of forcing functions

Jesse: A few times now you’ve used the word “forcing” to describe the way that you engage different parts of the organization with new ideas. Forcing the designers to see things in different ways, forcing the executives to see things in different ways. Forcing is some pretty strong language to use, and I wonder, you know, does it have to be a fight?

Rajat: I don’t say that in a pejorative way. It’s not forcing as a fight, but more like, in big corporations, speed and cost are the defining factors, right? People want to get things out and the natural order of things is the path of least resistance, is the shortest path, but it’s not the best path. It’s often the minefield also, people like to focus on their function, whether it’s the finance person, whether it’s the, even the CEO or the salesperson in what they are good at.

They do not have the time to understand the other functions and see how well they can integrate their thinking with that. When a designer is designing something, they look at solving problems. They look at understanding the value proposition. A salesperson can gain a lot from that. In defining what the sales and marketing approach, go-to-market strategy is.

So forcing I say because… let me put it this way. There is a really great practice that’s happening at Amazon right now, which Mr Bezos describes as forcing function, which is they don’t allow any PowerPoints. They say when a product person is going to present their product plan for a new product, we’re going to have all the cross functional people sit down together around a table, including the executives because the executives have attention of a gnat, right? Attention span of a gnat. We tell them to keep their phones away. They sit down and they are going to read the six-pager. Everybody in the room is sitting quietly for an awkward 35 40 minutes reading the six pager. And understanding they’re not looking at quick slides and taking key points. They’re reading the story, the value prop, the go-to-market strategy, the experiences. It’s well articulated. It’s well written. And they are reacting after that to that. To me, that is a force function, which is very uncomfortable because we live in a world of Keynotes and PowerPoints. But when you force people, when you incentivize people to collaborate, it starts with a forcing function and then it becomes a natural behavior.

So that’s the change I’m talking about.

Peter: Following that thread. One of the leaders we spoke with, last year, was Kaaren Hanson. and she mentioned operating mechanisms, right? One of her ways in to making change is by identifying the operating mechanisms and placing what she wants in there so that the system then kind of carries forward her agenda and it sounds a little bit like what you’re saying with with these forcing functions, the six pagers, that kind of thing.

I’m wondering what solutions you might have come up with in these last five, 10 years as you’ve been leading across these different design practices, that maybe weren’t there to begin with, or that the parties in one side didn’t know about, but that you’ve introduced as a way to kind of affect the operating mechanisms, apply these forcing functions.

Are there practices, are there activities, new ways of working, that you have either borrowed from your past that others weren’t doing in this new context that you were able to bring forward, or that you had to generate whole cloth? ‘Cause you’re like, we actually don’t have a way of helping digital and hardware work best together, and so we have to come up with something. Like how has that gone for you?

Rajat: A lot of war scars have taught me it’s not through best practices. It’s through failure that I learned things that don’t work and they sound really good in TED talks, but they don’t end up working. And some of the best practices are the ones that I learned from mentors and the ones that I learned through failure because I was doing it wrong, and repeatedly doing it wrong.

I’ll break this down into two sections here, Peter and Jesse. One is at a leadership level. How would you approach this? And one is at an individual contributor. Because everyone really, and I don’t say this in a cliched way, I do believe everyone is a leader at their level, right?

It’s a leadership mentality more than a position. At a leadership level, you create this cultural change through operating mechanisms, absolutely. But the operating mechanism cannot just be another overtly shown process because people get fatigued by that, right? You have to create very subtle insertions of interaction.

As a leader, what has worked for me is you want to bring change, if you want to bring collaboration, you have to continue every day to do bottom-up approach and top-down approach simultaneously. There is not one approach that fits all.

Which means like, if you are forcing the awareness around design and collaboration, you need to start training. At Honeywell, we trained about 60 VP GMs on design thinking, including the CEO, which gave us carte blanche. Once they got it, it’s like religion. Like, we get it. We believe in this. Go hire more people. That’s the reason we were able to scale our teams from 10 people to 300 and something people. Because the realization was we absolutely, absolutely need these cross-functional thinkers and connective tissue. So, at a leadership level, it’s about building that and it’s building real empathy for me in my leadership role. It has been about learning to think like a product leader, learning to think like a finance person, learning to think like a salesperson, which is not taught in design schools.

It’s been a journey for me and we get so focused on how design is the most important thing. You just really figure out it’s a subset of a larger mechanism that is an organization. So once you understand what, and this is where I think “customer-centric thinking” is most often overly used word and underused practice, right?

Your customers are also your stakeholders around you, right? Like if my finance person has no idea what I’m talking about, if I cannot tie it to how his P&L is going to change, or a marketing person. So those collaborations happened at Bose with a fantastic marketing leader who understood what we were trying to say.

So you have to learn to speak that language. That’s at a leadership level.

Learn from functions outside of design

Rajat: At an individual contributor level, I think it’s, it’s really about setting up mentorship programs, right? I was lucky to have managers who said, you need to find a mentor who’s not in the design organization. You need to spend at least an hour a month with this person to really understand what this person deals with every day, and what their challenges are. So that was a great practice for me because I didn’t know anything.

My first mentor in my experience here in America was a person from supply chain, and I’m like, what has supply chain got to do with design, right? And it was such a great relationship because I understood there were so many problems to be solved in supply chain which design could solve and which me helping think, in a design thinking way, could, I could solve for him also.

And he taught me so many things about the real challenges of sourcing, you know, materials, sourcing product, and it’s the same for other functions. So, one is really, finding for individual contributors, mentors outside, and then again, putting them in those environments where they learn.

Designers have this habit of sharpening the same pencil, right? If someone’s great at Figma, they’ll continue to get good at Figma. Someone’s good at sketching, they’ll continue to be good at sketching. Stop sharpening the same pencil, sharpen new pencils, right? And again, I use the word force because people find it difficult to get out of their comfort zone. Telling people, okay, tomorrow I want you to spend a day with our finance person and tell me what does she look for from this organization. It creates an amazing amount of empathy, and understanding, holistic understanding and improves their communication skill when they are trying to create that kind of holistic design approach.

Jesse: I love the approach that you’re describing here, this holistic understanding that you create by taking the perspectives and the points of view of lots of different people and being able to speak all of their languages. But as I think about the scope of what you’re describing, software and hardware and packaging and everything that touches the experience, putting it all together into that journey spanning that 20 foot long table. I look down that table and I see a long line of invested stakeholders with different agendas that you’ve just invited into this process. How do you manage the complexity of all those different needs, all those different requirements, all those different points of view, and reconcile those into something coherent?

Peter: And not get bogged down or,

Jesse: paralysis, right?

Peter: …paralysis. Yeah. Get pulled in so many directions that you can’t make any movement because you, you start one direction, then someone else is like, nope. So yeah.

Rajat: Yeah, that is, that’s a brilliant observation because that is true. When you set up all these touchpoints and this entire journey, which is dependent on so many things from sourcing to software development to yeah, yeah, we are great at building great smoke and mirror show. But then it has to be delivered, right, at the end of the day, and the dependencies are all these leaders from other functions who are, like, this is awesome but at the end of the day, how do I do this?

I think there have been those reviews, executive reviews, which have gone really well and there have been ones which have not gone well. But what my learning has been is, firstly, you have to be very careful about the invitee list for that level of executive review. Right? You cannot open it up for everyone and their sister and brother, right? It has to be the right number of people.

Secondly, you have to set the stage to tell people it doesn’t matter who we work for. It doesn’t matter what we do at that company. What matters is this is what our customer’s going to see at the end of the day. Okay. So keeping a focus on the fact to say, please put on your customer-centric glasses at this point and stop thinking about your function. It doesn’t matter.

And thirdly, I think the most important one, at least for me as a design leader, has been having the humility to really listen because most often I’ve found myself, I don’t know what I don’t know. Many times someone will tell me something which I have no understanding or I have no background in, or I have completely failed to register because I’m not a dev guy, but the kind of dev load this is going to take on the existing architecture.

So, not to be reactive and just kind of take in that input and set up a series of follow up meetings to say, I understood your point, but I would like you to kind of explain me a little bit more on how we can resolve that. So a typical review like that is typically followed by a series of follow ups after and sometimes even before. Because the one thing I learned about design leadership is you should have presented the work to everyone you’re going to invite in a group setting before the group setting, you don’t want to find yourself in a position where if I’m inviting Jesse and Peter to gain alignment on something, and I’m exposing this thing to them at the first time, at first glance here, they’re going to have a lot of feedback to give.

So you need to collect feedback. You need to have them get familiar with what they’re going to see in an individual setting and then bring them together so they can see each other’s perspective and kind of calibrate on the level of acceptance and the level of interest that the executive leadership is wanting in actually delivering something that…

Because at the end of the day, no level of complexity, no level of internal politics, no level of personal conflict matters. What really matters is, is the customer going to like and should we do this for the customer, right? And that’s what we really need to see at the end of the day and make it possible. So I’ve often seen people who have been completely disagreeing many times find themselves in this group setting and find that the majority is agreeing with this path and very quickly their opinions change and they find a solution where there wasn’t one.

Jesse: Hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Peter: Interesting. Do you, Rajat, have the authority to bring all these people together? And related to that is, what you are being held accountable for, what is your leadership or whomever you’re accountable to expecting of you? Do you have metrics that you’re expected to move? Or some other kind of defined accountability in the organization that then gives you the authority to do certain things?

And thus, yeah, you can say, hey. ” You five people. I need you in this room” and they will listen to you because of an authority and accountability. If you could unpack some of that.

Influence without authority; taking accountability

Rajat: Yeah, that is a big challenge, Peter. I think you both are really asking some really deep questions. Design has a lot of opinion with very little authority. I can share that based on my experiences. And no matter how strong the position is, unless you’re working for a founder company who is complete design enlightened person.

And there are companies like that, like Apple, where Steve Jobs completely understood the value of design implicitly. Or I would say even another great example would be Logitech, where Bracken Darrow understands design and uses the Chief Design Officer as his right hand person to bounce off ideas. You don’t often find those situations or Airbnb for that reason, right? Airbnb really gets it. You often have very little authority, but you have presence and you have a seat at the table.

So you have to employ a lot of different techniques to gain alignment. We try to use this approach is, and I’ll get to the second part, which you’re asking them, how do you measure the success for someone in a leadership role?

But firstly, getting people to align is not about aligning with design. It’s about aligning with what we call a winning definition, right? So once we’re out of the fuzzy front end, we come up with what’s called a winning definition. This is what we believe from a user experience perspective, from a tech perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, from a business side, the three legged stool.

This is what is going to be a winner for you, a winning definition. Okay, you are going to be evaluated… If you agree that this is winning definition, because we have research to say that customers are going to love this. We have research to say that our numbers say that it’s going to give you the projected revenue and growth. We have the research or we have your opinion to say that this is a viable, a feasible product, feasibility, viability and desirability. Once you align on that, then that becomes the measure for success for each one of us. When you go into design validation stage later on, which is many months later, you want to compare it with the winning definition.

And if you strayed way too far from it, you can easily identify who dropped the ball and who didn’t drop the ball, right? And what were the dependencies there that led to, I started with a horse and I ended with a donkey on the other side. There were a lot of compromises made. Death by a thousand cuts, right?

So you need to be able to hold yourself accountable to the vision that you collectively set. As a designer, success of a design group or even a design leader is very difficult. I’ll be honest, we have so many dependencies. Most companies have tried to figure out a metrics for success And they try to go with, you know, PSAT scores or customer engagement scores.

And, but I still think they’re very nebulous, right? Because to parse out from that, how much was design’s accountability versus engineering versus marketing is always very difficult. But that being said. I think that’s where design leadership is a little bit organic, right? You can see a design champion has to be someone who is fighting the good fight very, very clearly.

He or she is not the silent person on the table. I will go as far as to say I, I do believe design function is the true champion of the customer in large organizations, which are fortunately or unfortunately driven by revenue growth, are driven by volume expansion. Designers are driven by this other ideology that we learn in our colleges, which is all about great customer experience and delight.

Companies often focus on the outcome, which is building revenue and making money. That’s not an outcome. The outcome is great design, which leads you to make money. Right? Because you could argue, like, making money is not a goal. Everybody, every company has that. Corporations have been set up to generate revenue and market share. People often confuse that with the end goal, right?

So I don’t know. It’s very difficult question to answer. Every place I’ve worked at, I’ve tried to kind of calibrate into how do we create great measures of success for design and I’ll be upfront and say it’s not easy. It’s not that easy to define true success because it’s so interwoven with other functions. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If the product does well, everybody wins, right?

Where design leadership needs to be judged is did this person call out the right things at the right time? And did this person put the right red flags at the right time? Or put the veto, and those are difficult decisions, right? To be in a place where everybody is like thumbs up and high fiving and there’s a design leader, she is saying ,I don’t think we should go to market with this, it’s a very difficult position to be I think, that needs to be rewarded and appreciated rather than being seen as, oh design is again creating you know, a challenge for us, which is going to delay launch.

Jesse: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point because as you mentioned earlier, large scale organizations are optimized to maximize speed and reduce cost. And design almost always feels like it is pulling in the opposite direction against those things.

And you know, it’s interesting to hear what you have to say about defining success metrics. ‘Cause it is obviously something that lots of organizations struggle with. Lots of design leaders struggle with. What I notice in there is that it’s one thing to talk about measuring the success of something after it’s launched. It’s a different thing to justify the continued and growing investment in design on the part of an organization.

And it’s on the design leaders often to make the case to these executives who don’t have good metrics, who have, as you point out, their own lenses, their own ways of seeing things. You have built and scaled multiple design teams, as you have said, in the absence of really good, strong metrics to justify those efforts. How do you get people to continue to invest in design and to put more investment in design in a situation like that?

Rajat: Again, it varies from organization to organization and it is very top down in my opinion. Organizations with the executive leadership team and the CEO understand design intrinsically, it’s not difficult. I’ve worked in those organizations where they’re like, we get it. You don’t have to explain it to me. I get it. I saw Steve Jobs turned their company 800x. Design… they talk about design. Okay. Thank you Steve Jobs for doing that for us, right?

But in most companies they are driven by saying, okay, design sounds nice, let’s sprinkle a little design on this, and they treat design as a service function not as a strategic partner, right? The job for a design leader in those organizations is especially difficult, because not only do they have to convince the value of design amongst the peers, they also have to build competency and capability to scale to deliver that, right? So you, you are saying that this will allow us to win the race, but you’re building the car while you are participating in the race, right? It’s difficult.

So how do you show that? And I think again, we can get into this. There are matrices to measure input in terms of what the bottom line is. What I’ve at least noticed is it really comes down to training top down leadership on design thinking, okay. Once they understand and at least what worked for me in a very large Fortune 100 company was, don’t try to boil the ocean.

Start small

Rajat: Start small, like a prototype, locate your design organization as a prototype, right? If a big corporation has five verticals each multibillion dollar vertical and sub verticals, don’t try to create a design impact across. Focus on one or two strategic business units and show the results of participating, putting design embedment into that, and showing… And you don’t have to show it to the people who are working with the designers, because they’ll spend a month and be like, I love having a designer make me think very differently and bring a lot of value and research and quality. They will get converted.

Once you are able to embed that and show what the results look like in terms of the P&L, then you can scale it across organizations, then every VP/GM is going to say, I want a similar kind of team embedded within my group, because I saw what happened in complement with the training that they went through, right?

So start small and scale big, and hope that there is not a lot of executive leadership change that happens in that process.

Jesse: It’s interesting that you describe training the executives in design thinking as a key part of the strategy here, because in my experience, what I hear about initiatives to train executives in design thinking, I hear two different stories.

One is, Oh man, the design thinking training, it was a total bust. We went in there, we taught them everything. We showed them all the frameworks and the methods and stuff. And they said, Hey, that was fun. And they patted us on the head and they sent us back to our cubicles.

The other story that I hear is, yeah, the design thinking training was a huge success. All the executives that got way into it, they’ve decided to incorporate it into their own decision making processes and they decided that they don’t need us there at all.

So how have you managed to find the third way here?

Rajat: Jesse, the second thing is happening to the entire design function, to be honest overall, right now, we have manufactured the guns to shoot ourselves, we have trained people in design thinking, which has led to people thinking that they don’t need designers, which is not true, which is not true.

I think it comes down to the level of maturity and style of design training, where a little bit of knowledge doesn’t mean… and it’s cyclical, right? Like, a lot of product leaders who have gone through design thinking think they understand it and some of them do. And the reaction: one is, that I want to build a design team. Like I currently report to a chief product officer whose background is engineering, but he’s a brilliant product leader. But during the early days of his career, he got a chance to work at frog as an engineer, and he told me that, you know, when I worked at frog, it opened up a different side of my mind, which I never knew. I have never felt the need to convince him of design thinking because he gets it. In fact, he pushes me on more design, more design, right? So once you turn on that switch, it can lead to a reaction saying, I get it. And I don’t need a big design team. I’ll just work with consultants and hire them as needed or it can lead to a thinking saying I get it and I need equal parts designers and engineers, right?

Both those situations are not bad. In my opinion, if you’re an in-house designer, you might complain about the first one saying all the design is getting outsourced, right? But the challenge with that is it’s great for the front end thinking, but then when you have to deliver designs, you really need embedded designers and it can get very costly because design product development time takes very long.

It’s great for consultants because confusion at the part of client is money for the… right, right? And I don’t criticize either one of those parts. The way I have at least tried to do is when we did design training, it was a two day event. We didn’t make it abstract. We said, bring your best people and bring the biggest problem that you’re facing in your organization right now.

And let’s use that as an example. And when they see that, how much we uncover in two days, whether it’s about problem identification, root cause, or about solution space, they just can’t leave it at that because that directly impacts their end of year goals. And they’re like, I need you to put two designers in my team right now.

I want to continue on this path, right? If you make it very abstract, then they, it’s like reading a good book and they’ll forget it in a couple of days, pretty much.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: Did this role already exist before you joined or was this role created when you joined? And then, two parter, how has the role evolved or how has your mandate evolved since you’ve been there?

Rajat: This is a great question, Peter. I’m smiling because I wanted to share this story, but I didn’t know how I’ll weave this into this conversation.

Peter: Boom!

Rajat: I was always interested in home automation because I feel homes are very analog in my opinion right now, right? Our cars are a lot more advanced than our homes and we pay only like, we pay 20x on a house versus a car.

But our cars have smart security, smart comfort, you know, all kinds of smart lighting our homes don’t. And when you live with those homes, with those features, you realize, a home can care for you, can understand you and know you. And be very, very proactive in terms of setting conditions that you want during different times of the day, different times of the year.

So for me, it’s a very fascinating space. And I think we will live in an era where we’ll remember homes when they were very analog versus homes when they were very smart, right? And we’re going through that transition right now. When I was approached by this company, because I also worked at a spinoff of Honeywell called Residio, which was also focused on home automation, which is when I started to understand the potential of the space is incredible if done right. If I can convince my grandmother and grandfather to understand home automation, I win. Right now we are only targeting power users who like cameras, who like devices. It’s not about devices. It’s about experiences that the home can create for you. So, I found out about this company Vivint, which started as basically buying hardware and selling hardware door to door to getting into the service space, to getting into building their own platform, to building into new services and domains like insurance and energy.

So, I was like, this company has been making right moves. They reached out to me and said, we are looking for a design leader. I’m like, okay, you don’t have a design leader right now, you have done so many things which are changing the home automation market.

They said, we have a leader for UX. We have a leader for industrial design. But both those leaders are recognizing that their teams need a voice at a much higher level, right? And I was like, wow, this realization is incredible. And the chief product officer pretty much said, I need someone who sits with me and can understand me and help me understand the design team better, because the leadership I have right now is so focused on following directions and delivering on what is required in a fantastic way, that sometimes I don’t know if I’m able to build their capabilities to their full potential. So I need someone who can look at it at a higher altitude and understand how design can be woven together, both in terms of customer-facing, non-customer-facing, which is service techs, sales channels, marketing, someone who can really bring this as end to end experience.

To me, that story resonated really strongly. And I’m like, okay, they know what design can do. And that’s why they’re looking for it. I was interviewed by the chief product officer, the CEO, and people I manage today, which is great, because they wanted to see who is going to be this person who’s going to be our leader.

So my managing staff, my directors, they interviewed me and they said, this could be the right person for us. So for me, that was very comforting that there’s not just a realization at an executive level, there’s a realization at the team level to say, we simply don’t have that vantage point, nor do we have the time to be able to focus. We have to focus on the eye of the fish. We can’t focus on the blue ocean. We need someone to be able to look at where we are, look at it at a different altitude.

Peter: And that was a year and a half ago. Has the role been the same for that year and a half or has it evolved since you’ve been there, and if so, how so?

Rajat: It’s been one of the smallest teams I’ve managed in my career. And it has been one of the most rewarding teams I’ve managed because I have never had a chance to work with a product leader and executive leadership team, which is so woke in terms of design. So I’ve not had to train them or push those agendas because they understand it.

What has changed is we started as a mid-size company of five to $6 billion, and we got acquired by this massive company called NRG, which is based out of Houston. And NRG also doesn’t have a complementary group as a design group there, right? So they are now looking at us and thinking, wow, they have a design group. How do we use a design group? We have five apps and we have websites and we have products and, but energy is a commodity at the end of the day. How do we build energy as an experience and story where we can differentiate in markets like Texas and you know, the Southwest where people can shop for energy, you can buy energy from different vendors, right? So what is that experience around energy that differentiates us?

So I think what has changed is now I have to really think even bigger than I was thinking to really understand our home automation now includes energy and our Trojan horse into people’s home is not going to be just a security story, but it’s going to be energy story which will be complemented by energy, comfort, lighting, aging in place, and all the other things. So I think that’s what’s changed is I’m recalibrating, how do I scale up my role in a way that I’m best able to serve the needs of the new company?

When your mandate is broader than your boss’

Peter: Something I hear from folks I work with. So you report to a chief product officer…

Rajat: Mm-hmm.

Peter: …but it sounds like your mandate goes beyond your boss’s mandate. You mentioned things like packaging. That’s typically a marketing responsibility that you’re involved with, that would be separate from your chief product officer.

You were also mentioning end to end experience, so there’s likely some, some relationship with sales or channels or whatever that you’re looking at that would be beyond your chief product officer’s remit. And I’m wondering what, if any, struggles you’ve had in going beyond the bounds of the silo that you happen to find yourself in? As you recognize, end to end means literally end to end, but they had to put you somewhere and you’re not reporting to the CEO. So, your leader does have bounds that are maybe closer in than your own.

Rajat: There is a saying, right? Culture eats strategy for lunch, right? A good strategy would be having a very robust operating model where there is dotted line reporting, direct reporting, and a very clear structure. I would love to have that. But since we’ve just gone from a relatively smaller company to a much bigger company, it would be a little audacious and a little bit assuming of me to want that happen immediately. I need to be part of that change.

But what is working really well is the culture of this company is so strong that there is a very innate sense of working together. So I haven’t had to lean on an operational structure as much as I would have in other companies because the relationships are so close with the marketing, with the sales, that they are opening doors and they’re saying, yes, tell us you don’t need to be part of our structure or my reporting structure.

So I’m able to influence that more easily when I hit a wall, I will go back and knock on the executive doors and say, we need a more robust structure because I can only take goodwill that far.

Jesse: So I’d love to zoom out of this context and look at design leadership broadly, if we can for a second, ’cause you’ve got a, a unique perspective, on the challenge and the opportunity of design leadership. And I’m curious what you think is missing in design leadership. The way that other people talk about the role and the challenges and, and maybe the opportunities that other people are overlooking here. What are some ways of thinking about design leadership that you feel like are underrepresented in how people talk about it

Rajat: You know, I, it’s so difficult to answer this question because I was just at Institute of Design meeting with a lot of my friends who I graduated with, who had come back for a panel session there. There were a lot of design leaders there. And I don’t know if I have the perfect answer for you because we are still a relatively young field, right?

And we’re still figuring out, we’re going through our teenage right now. And everyone has their own flavor of doing things, right? And me as a design leader, I’m learning from other leaders and listening to them and we’re all trying to solve similar problems, but approaching it slightly differently.

I don’t think there is a cohesive way. The one thing I do feel we as design leaders need to be doing slightly differently is, when we meet at design events, wearing our nice black coats, and black shirts, and skinny jeans, and we get so excited, we share the work that every team is doing, but we don’t often talk about common challenges that we’re facing.

Right. We are not as united in terms of a guild as we are in terms of expression, right? We need to get together and, and have discussions about similar challenges we are having.

I, I feel that kind of approach needs to happen at conferences. But conferences end up being more of like show and tell less about collaborative, like let’s solve the common design problems because all the design capital is here right now, right? We don’t do that as much because we are siloed within our own function a little bit.

I feel that that’s been my thought but other than that I think there are some design thinkers and leaders who are doing incredible work and I would steal that at a moment’s notice. I don’t care about, you know, I don’t care about self-expression if someone’s doing something, right? I’d love to borrow that idea and use it, which is what I’ve done over the years. Things that work.

Peter: On that note, I’m wondering, what have you seen recently that you’ve found enlightening, illuminating, that you’ve gravitated towards? Is there some person or some, something out there that you’ve stolen from recently?

Rajat: Yeah, I’ll give you a perfect example. It is so difficult to design a design org, right? I’m preaching to the choir here. It’s so difficult to design a perfect design org. There are so many different ways you can slice and dice it. So we tried two different ways. First one didn’t work. Second one did work and it worked to the level that we were able to bring in some incredible leaders from Google, Microsoft and other big companies to come and be very engaged working there. And that point, the leader at Bose reached out to me and said, I want to talk to you about design organizations, right? How do you build it? What are the challenges that you’re facing?

So for me, I think the most recent one was not just sharing my thoughts around it, but learning. And in the process, he said, I would like you to come here. I didn’t know he was planning to leave, but I went there and I found that there are a lot of different ways to structure design orgs. And that’s an area that I’ve tried to learn from different leaders and figure out what is the best solution for that particular company, because there’s no one size fits all, but that’s one practice that I’ve kind of used. And then honestly, Jesse, what you just said, what I’m working on right now, from other leaders is, how do you measure success of design as a function and design as a organization, a function as in like expertise within a project and organizations like holistically, how are we performing, that we can increase our base by 10%, 20%. That clarity of measurement is something I’m trying to seek and understand and I’ve been in a lot of different talks and I’ve not yet found the perfect solution around that.

Jesse: I don’t think anybody has. Peter, do you have anything else for us?

Peter: I was going to ask but I think Rajat just kind of preempted it. I was going to ask like, you know, what, what are those things that you are looking to uncover, you just mentioned things like organization and metrics. I don’t know if there’s additional stuff, you know, you’ve been very you’ve been very honest, I think even a little vulnerable in, in terms of your journey as a design leader.

And while you figured some stuff out, it’s clear that you’re still figuring stuff out. So is there anything else that you find yourself kind of pushing at the edges of as you’re trying to expand or extend your leadership space?

Rajat: Yeah, again, I’m so happy you asked me this question because my personal journey is to answer this question. As a design leader, I’m trying to figure out for the last two decades, what makes someone creative? What makes a truly creative individual because most often I see that we as designers have standardized frameworks of thinking and I, I’m guilty of that, right?

We have standard ways of research, standard ways of discovery, and translation and visualization, but what I’m finding, at least in the last 10 years working in big corporations, that disruptive innovation is not getting in through the door. Incremental improvements and incremental are seeing the light of the day. I am seeing more disruptive innovations happening at startups, right? And what is that creative thinking that is enabling? I mean, there are multiple hypotheses here. Yeah. Not only what is that creative thinking as a group that is leading people to Uber as an example to make strangers, to go sit in a stranger’s car, to have strangers come stay in your house and Airbnb, to binge watch on Netflix.

What are they doing to create an environment of support and creativity where ideas which are truly disruptive with 10x, 100x growth are able to flourish? And how are they able to recruit those thinkers which are still having the capacity to not get burdened by process to the extent that they can only come up with incremental improvements and not look at the world so differently that they can make a dent in the universe.

To me, that is what is really keeping me up because I’d like to be part of that change somewhere.

Jesse: I love that vision. Rajat, thank you so much.

Rajat: Thank you so much, Jesse.

Jesse: If people want to find you on the internet, where can they find you?

Rajat: They can find me on LinkedIn under my name. They can email me. There is an email address there and of course I am an avid photographer and traveler so they can find me on Instagram under my name because as I travel through my life, I try to capture moments a lot on Instagram.

You can find me by my last name Shail and the letter Z–Shailz.

You should be able to find me with on Instagram.

Peter: Excellent.

Jesse: Terrific. Thank you so much.

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