Finding Our Way

Transcript Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Together: And we’re finding our way Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show information architect and author Abby Covert joins us. We’ll hear about her journey from consulting to in-house and back out again, what she’s learned along the way about burnout and work-life balance and her forthcoming book on the power of diagrams as tools for thinking. Peter: Abby, Jesse, and I asked you here, actually, your involvement in this conversation, unbeknownst to yourself started about a year and a half ago. Well, it was, it was, it was, it was after you wrote, I choose me and Jesse and I were recording the podcast back in those– at that time. But then we ended up taking a year- long hiatus and we never got around to asking you. So it’s now a year- plus later and you’re here. And just to make it clear for anyone listening, there was a post you wrote called, “I choose me” that talked about your kind of journey as a, I’m trying to think of the right way to frame it, journey as a practitioner, journey as a professional, trying to figure out your space within corporations and within organizations and what you learned and what you took away from that. And it resonates with a lot of the conversations that Jesse and I had had, both between ourselves, and others that had been on that we talked to in the kind of year prior. So it’s great to have you here to now finally talk about it. Well, I guess just to kind of ground ourselves, we don’t, you don’t need to do a recapitulation of the piece, but I’m kind of curious what spurred it for you? Why, why write that? Why put that out there? What were you, what was, what was the demon that you were trying to unleash or let go of that, that got you to, I mean, there’s like 3000 words or 4,000 words… Abby: Yeah, Peter: It’s not short. So what was that process like? Abby: So I think it really came down to needing to close a chapter and open a new one. And I took that really literally. Like I just, I really needed to move on from a period of time where I had very much been in flux. And my position in that company was very in flux. My relationship with myself was very in flux. I was moving across the country. I was trying to get pregnant. Like there was just so many things going on in my life that I had sort of lost the love of writing along the way. Like I did a lot of writing as a part of my job at Etsy, but ultimately I wasn’t writing for myself anymore. And I felt like in the days after I, I left, which that piece came out about 10 days after I left, I kind of locked myself in my office and just went to town on it. I just really needed to write the story for myself. And then I happened to be teaching a– and one of the, like people who asked questions at the end of the workshop, like thanked me for being authentic about my experience with something they had asked me about. And that was the push, that was the push that was like, okay, I’m actually going to, like, make this a piece that goes out into the world. And isn’t just for me, ’cause I would say 80% of what I write never sees the light of day. But that piece felt like it… Peter: So, you originally just wrote that almost like a diary entry or journal entry, just something for you to process what you thought. I see. Abby: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And then once I knew that I was going to share it, that’s where the like drawing out of specific lessons came from and like kind of formulating it into more of like a piece for others. But yeah, no that started from, I just have a really strong journaling practice. So I create a lot of words is whether or not I use them for other people is sort of up to the context. So yeah, that, that piece really it meant a lot to me. To sort of like put a final point on something that was very ambiguous for myself and for my team as well. But also for like people that don’t know me that well, but know me a little bit, like, it just seemed like, okay, we’re in the middle of this, like, global catastrophe, you’re at the super staff senior level. You just had a kid, what’s happening? Like where, what are you doing? You know, like what’s the story there. And it was a really easy way for me to kind of get that out in my own words so that people could kind of take it as they would. And I got a lot of feedback from, from folks saying that it was a really helpful thing to hear and that my experience very much reflected other people’s so yeah. Happy to, happy to be that model, I guess. Peter: I remember blogging. Abby: Yeah, Do you Peter, do you remember blogging? Jesse: Never heard of it. So you find yourself in this circumstance where you were going through a lot of transition, a lot of change. But I get the sense that something was changing inside of you as well in this. What was changing about your view of yourself, your relationship to your career, your, your relationship to the world in this time that you were trying to capture. Abby: Oh man, I’m going to put it real simple. I was a workaholic. It’s not the only -aholic that I was. And I am deeply in recovery from that at this point. For the first 10 years of my career, as an IA, I burned at both ends. And I wasn’t taking care of myself, like not even a little bit. And as I started to make the decision to start a family and bring another person into the world, I knew that that wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be as a parent. And yeah, I started to clean myself. And in that process, I realized that a lot of the way that I was practicing, the way that I spoke about IA, the sort of attitude that I had about it was very much tied to my self-esteem and the way that I felt about myself and and the workaholism was all just the place to hide it. You know, just if I work really, really hard, no one will notice that I also don’t know what the fuck is going on around here, just like everybody else. So yeah, I would say that’s the biggest thing is I like consciously reduced my working hours. That was like the first big decision was, as an independent consultant, can I do way fewer hours and still make enough money that I can live? And that became a really interesting challenge for me. I had a couple- year period where I like heavily focused on time as sort of a material in my life. Because I, I figured that was the, that was the way forward. That was the thing that I had, was I had the time, I, you know, I wasn’t committed to raising a family yet. I was free. I lived in New York City and could do what I wanted with my 24 hours. And I really used that to figure out like, what do I actually want to do? And writing my first book came out of that. Like I stopped burning both ends for other people, and I continued to burn at both ends for myself. So it was sort of like, step one, learn that when you remove other people, all your problems are still there. Step two: actually deal with yourself. So yeah, why did I write a book called How to Make Sense of any Mess? Spoiler alert! I was the mess, you know, I was the one that I fun and that book, like, I, it did it, it made sense of my mess. And yeah, that’s, that’s kind of how we got to where we are now. Jesse: And so you have, as part of this, you made the choice to step away. So I guess you, as, did you choose to step away from a full-time in-house role in order to create this space for yourself? Or was it the other way around that having stepped away, you discovered the potential there for you. Abby: I think that all of the work I had done on myself still did not keep me from recognizing until it was very, very late in the burnout cycle. That something was very bad for me, in terms of my position. I had a lot of factors that had nothing to do with the actual output of my role, that was the emotional weight of that job and that organization. And that was all kind of mixed up in the emotional weight of everything that was going on in, in 2020. So I think ultimately, I needed the skills I had already learned about myself and this tendency to put other people first to put the work above my, my own needs. I needed that skillset to finally recognize it. But ultimately like I needed– I hired a coach to help me to leave that job. Because that was a huge decision for me to sort of like jump into this expansive, just space for myself to figure out what was next, instead of go find another job and jump to the next thing, which was my tendency before. So yeah, it was a lot of, a lot of careful preparation that could not keep it from still being a bit of a firestorm at the end. So it was, yeah, it was a fun, dramatic moment in the arc of my life, for sure. Peter: I’m wondering what it’s meant for you to put, to do what can appear selfish in terms of putting yourself first, but doing it… well, in what appears to put yourself first in order that you can actually show up for others again, but in a way that you want to. And I’m wondering kind of how you, how, how you’ve navigated that. Abby: Oh gosh. Well, okay. First of all, the word selfish being a bad thing, I think is like a cultural problem. I also think that selfless is a real cultural problem. So there’s something about being like full of oneself that like I’m getting comfortable with. And I feel like, um, making decisions for your own interests is not selfish. It’s not a way to please everybody, that’s for damn sure, but it’s not actually selfish. What’s selfish is hiding what you actually want from other people and slowly resenting them because you’re not getting what you want. That’s selfish. So I don’t know. I feel like there’s there’s a lot to unpack there. You know, like I want to be full of myself. I want to make decisions in my life that are full of what myself wants and if that makes it so I can’t have a corporate job, I’m very fortunate to be able to make that decision that like, yup, that’s what it means right now. And so that’s what I’m doing right now. Peter: Yeah, I think I’ve made a similar decision. I’ve been independent for the last three years at Jesse’s made a similar decision in his independence for the last couple of years, but I still work with a lot of design leaders who clearly feel beholden to a context that they’ve almost found themselves in. ” Oh, I can’t leave this organization. I’ve hired all. these people. They need me,” or like, “but I don’t like my job, but I don’t know what else would I would do, but I have to earn money for my family, but I have…” like, and many of these concerns are legitimate, but there’s a navigating that selfish to selflessness is a challenge I mean, clearly, that everyone has. Abby: Yeah, those are all valid challenges, all challenges that you have to really like go deep inside of yourself about the stories you’re telling yourself about all of those things. Like, okay, you hired a team and now you don’t like the job running that team. Is it really, like, you, just by hiring those people, you’ve made a decision for your whole life that you’re going to be in a job you don’t like, like if you were to survey those people about what they wanted for their friend who was in that position, would those people give that friend that advice? Probably not. If they were in that position, would they give themselves that advice? Would their loved ones? Probably not. So, yeah. I feel like in a lot of cases, it’s, it’s stories that we’re telling ourselves that we really have to confront. I mean, there’s, there’s valid reasons to stay in a job that you don’t like. There’s also a lot of people that are in jobs they don’t like, because they don’t think that they have the opportunity to leave. They’re either not presented with the opportunity or they’re not ready to look for it. Or they’ve been looking and they haven’t found the right thing yet. You know, those are all valid paths. It’s just which one are you? Jesse: Yeah. I mean, I think that there is a certain amount of inertia that sets in. It’s definitely something… so, in my leadership coaching work, now I’m working with people one-on-one where they’re navigating exactly this territory of the trade-offs between where I am now, where I want to be, can I create that here? Or do I need to go somewhere else that’s going to serve me? How do I know where I draw those lines? And I think it can be especially challenging for people in design because I think that there’s often this mindset that is this kind of service orientation. Like we do what we do in the service to users. We do what we do in service to the business. We’re always in the service in some way. And we forget that, you know, to your earlier point, sometimes the best way to be in service to others is to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves, so we can show up in our full capacity. And part of that means not getting into situations where we’re so constrained by our organizational context, that we can’t be our best selves as leaders. And then, you know, that just is a cascade effect across the organization. Abby: Yeah. So that whole, like saying about how you have to put on your mask before you can help other people put on their mask. Like that’s, that’s what it comes down to. Like if you’re, if you’re not meeting your own intentions and your own self in terms of your needs, you’re not really going to be able to do that for other people. You might be able to pretend for a really long time, yeah. And also, I mean, for me, the older I got, the less I could hold on to that, you know, like I felt like in my twenties I really could burn it at both ends and pack the hours on and not sleep and skip all the stuff. And as I got older, I couldn’t do that anymore. It’s a, it’s a natural forcing function of like, oh crap. I have to choose. I have to choose turns out. I’m not invincible. We’re all gonna die one day. God dang it. So yeah, you got to choose. And I chose me. That’s just that… Peter: We’ll just keep hitting that chord every, every 10 to 15 minutes. We’ll we’ll… Abby: …like a politician. That’s my, that’s my line. That’s my [garbled]. Jesse: But this wasn’t your first time going independent, right? You’d been an independent consultant before, hadn’t you? Abby: Yeah, no, this was, I had been independent for years. Etsy was my last client. Well, it was a kind of like a, a typical, a woman meets company story. You know, she goes in as a consultant and there’s so many messes that they hire her full time. And it was, it was exactly that. I mean, I, I made sense of some of the most amazing messes of my career at Etsy, and I really enjoyed my time there. Things just got weird at the end, you know, I became the edge case, so that’s never good, yeah. Peter: I’m going to go… I’m here we go. We’re going in. We’re going into your time… Abby: …do it. Peter: So you were brought in as an information architect kind of explicitly, Abby: Yes. Peter: You were the only person with that title, with that role, kind of set, set, some set the stage for what it means for Abby Covert, the, the a traveling Troubadour of IA to land within an organization and, and plant your roots., And do I in this one place, what, what was that experience? Abby: Yeah. So so like back then a big part of my business was going in and doing overall IA assessments of organizations of all shapes and sizes. And so I went in to do that for Etsy. There was 10 large-scale recommendations that came out of that. And one of them was that they had such a large information architecture problem set that they really needed somebody to own that space in house. And that was a proposal that was for in-house without it kind of being attached to me. But once it started to be discussed that this was really going to be a job, they were really gonna hire somebody to do it. That kind of coincided with my own life choices of sort of wanting to slow down and go somewhere and really focus on collaboration with a team. And so, yeah, kind of like all the forces came together. Once I was there the big decision was like, what level do I exist at when there are no other people that do what I do. There was no manager who did what I did, although I was brought in by Alex Wright, who is an information architect of his past, so there was a lot of, you know, understanding of that skillset. So when I got there, I was brought in at a staff level. I was basically like a, like an IA ninja for hire within the organization. So instead of doing consulting projects with clients externally, I just did them from my seat in Melbourne, full-time for Etsy. Teams from all over the organization that were coming to me and asking me for help on discreet projects. And that’s sort of how the whole thing started. After that, I got the attention of the executive team for some of my work, and I was invited to pitch a larger project, which was figuring out how Etsy could look at the voice of the customer that was coming from a whole lot of different channels. And so I was put it into a seat of sort of like project leading that because it was a really large initiative. It was like take all of these different customer service and research and social media, all these channels from all over the world, and put them into a single list of issues that the business faced and then create a rubric that would allow us to organize that list by something meaningful for the business. So… Peter: So that’s something internally focused. That’s that’s a tool for, for executives on a dashboard… Abby: Yeah. Yeah, it was actually a really big Google spreadsheet. That’s the big fanciness of it. But that was a, that was really like a, a banner project for me because it, it took the idea of information architecture outside of just the interface layer internally. And so more and more, I was asked to consult on things that were about the information architecture of the business. So I was brought onto the team that renovated the help center which “we now have one” was kind of like the, the headline there. Also like the, the tool set for sellers was something that I had quite a hand in. So yeah, it was just sort of like collecting projects that were on the end-user side for both buyers and sellers, but also trying to focus that same effort internally to kind of raise the information architecture competency, but also to use the tools to get real work done which the voice of the customer program, I think ended up being pretty cool. Peter: should I just keep going Jesse? ‘Cause I… Jesse: Well, I mean, so the next question is, so that all of that sounds great, but what happened next? Abby: Well, I mean, next I, I went and got myself pregnant and was really excited about that. Went through the whole pregnancy, doing my thing. And then I went out for six months, which is a blessing. I was very fortunate to work for one of the companies in the US that does that. One of the few companies, I would say, in the US that gives that kind of benefit. I would say the downside of such a benefit is that it was an, an organization that literally reinvents itself every three months. So I missed two cycles, is basically what happened. And when you come back into an organization with a title that no one has, a track record that proves that you need promotion, but no one has any kind of understanding of what that might mean or where to put you, it starts to create some really uncomfortable conversations. So when I first got back, I had sort of like the greatest experience you could possibly have, which is not having a boss and being told you could work on anything you want. It turns out that’s terrible because nobody’s actually responsible for you. No one is actually green-lighting what you’re doing with your time. And so you’re just sort of like floating out there, hoping that you’re creating enough value, that you’re not going to get attention in a negative way, which is not a way to go to work day after day. So I attached myself really quickly to a project that I saw a lot of value in from an IA standpoint. And I was able to function as an IA on that project for the first six months. And then there was a position opened up through my work on that project for a product manager. And knowing that the jobs title conversation was getting very fraught, um, I decided to take a rotation as a product manager and use my IA skills to help stand up a team. And so I stood up a team of 10 engineers. I think it was by the time I left and we were doing a pretty high value project. But it also was like the moment that I realized that while I was a really good PM because of my IA skills, it was absolutely not the job I wanted to have. I didn’t get to actually do the work in a deep way. I could only do it at a very high level kind of like hand-wavy way. And that wasn’t ultimately going to be fulfilling for me. So as the cycles were like kind of the, the driver of all things, there was an end of a cycle coming up with a quarter ending. And I just decided to do my team the service of saying, Hey, you should plan the next quarter without me, because I don’t think I’m going to make it. And yeah, that was, that’s what happened. Peter: I want to, I want to rewind, Abby: Sure. Peter: Something I’m trying to better understand, which is, why does it matter that the job title thing was a problem? Right? Like, like you are a capable practitioner, you know the value you were bringing. It sounded like a lot of the other people within the organization understood the value that you could deliver them. It had gotten a little confused during your maternity leave when, when some of the sands shifted, but who gives a shit what your title is… Abby: oh Peter: …as long as you’re doing good work and getting well paid? Abby: Yeah. You know, I really wanted that to be the case. And I think that for like four years, I was cool with that. I was sorta like, all right, every meeting that I go into, I’m going to have to explain what an information architect is, why I’m the only one, what it is that I do and how I’m going to be able to help you. And I need to be able to do that in the first three and a half minutes, because look, we only got half an hour meeting and we actually have to do work in that. What I found though, Peter, is that after a few years of doing that two things happened. One, I got fucking jaded. I was just, like, so sick of explaining what I do to every single person I encounter, sometimes the same person again, that I’d have to explain it to because like cycles have changed. They have a new boss, we’re on a new project, whatever it is. I just got, I got sick of it. I just got really, really jaded. And then two, I got really down on myself. Like I started to believe that maybe information architecture is not a real thing. Like maybe the job I do, isn’t a real thing that’s necessary. And I’m gonna tell you right now, that’s not the case. And it especially was not the case on the teams that I was at at Etsy, but it is what my self-esteem started to tell me, because you can only go so long, fighting that hard, to be recognized for the value that you have, before you get burnt out. And so it was just like the culmination of those two things, the jaded and the self-esteem crash. It just put me into like a, I went from being a, A-player to an, A-player that was like not wanting to get out of bed. And that’s not cool. That’s, that’s not the way that good work gets done. That’s not the way that information architecture has a chance in that organization. So, yeah, it was, it was time for a change. So you’re you’re right though. I mean like, why does it matter that nobody knows what your job title is and that you make money. That’s cool. Like, why not just do that? And I think that works for some time, but there’s a limit, Peter: yeah, it feels… Abby: limit. Peter: …it feels to me, or if I were to diagnose this, like there, there, there, there was a, failure might be too strong of a word, but the one that comes to mind, a failure, a failure of leadership, right? Your leadership didn’t quite make the, like, they made enough of a space to bring you in and they recognized the value that you could deliver, but then they didn’t continue that work to maintain that space, to inform others to weave you into their practices. Like one of the questions I had ahead of time is like, because. And I’m sure you talk to people about this with some frequency, like what is the relationship between good IA practice and standard issue product design as as practiced in most of these companies, right? And as I was thinking about your time there, I found myself wondering, like, how did you integrate with whatever the existing practices and processes were? But it sounds like that would have it, it sounds like it kept being one-off one-off one-off one-off it never got systematized. And, and that strikes me as like a failure. There’s some failure of recognizing that kind of ongoing sustainable value. And that, that to me is a failure of leadership to encourage it. If it’s, if it is delivering value… Abby: right… Peter: …to the business, which it sounds like it was. Abby: Yeah. No. And I think that, like, if you had asked me if we’d had this conversation right after I wrote that piece, I think I would agree with you that this was like a big failure of leadership. But there’s actually, I think reflecting on it more recently, I think the part that I wrote in there about the Ship of Theseus is actually really important in this. So the Ship of Theseus is like, if you replace all of the pieces of a ship over time, is it the same ship? Like, can you still call it the same ship? Etsy was very much like that from a leadership perspective. So like, when you say that it was a failure of leadership, who exactly is the leader that was failing because the people who were leading me at every discreet moment were part of a chain. And the handoffs between those people were not handled great, but when are they, you know, it’s like individual people, leaving roles is almost always messy, especially if they’re leaving the organization. So I see it less as a failure of leadership and more a failure of being able to see real people in organizations as people, and understand that their resilience as people in those organizations actually do demand attention long-term that doesn’t tie to just one person staying the same in the org. Like, I mean, we all need like a fairy godmother who is going to shepherd us through the organization. And none of us seem to get that, you know, if you’re lucky you’re going to get a manager that you’re gonna have for some time, but in my experience, not just at Etsy, but also with clients that I worked with before, that management in this industry changes over very quickly. And so it’s really difficult, especially when you throw something like a six-month leave in the middle of it for that chain to not break. So, yeah, I don’t, I don’t have any, I don’t have any blame for any specific leaders and it’s hard for me to sort of like call it a failure of leadership since that’s like an individual person skill, as opposed to like the skill of the org. So I think, I think it’s something else. It’s something it’s a failure of the organization, for sure. And like, in your specialty at org design, a big old failure, they just, I was like a hot potato on the org charts. Like throw her over there. She will make value, throw her over there. She makes bullion fries. Like it was just, you know, I, and I was, I was very valuable in every position that I found myself in, but it was, I think in the piece I described it as one of my last managers there said that it was all invisible work. It’s all work that is very valued by the people that you’re doing the work for in the org, but when it gets to the, like, who gets promoted, who gets the understanding of like value in the org at that like larger place that all comes down to a totally different set of criteria that I was not properly hooked into. Simply because I did not have a job title that I shared with other people. So, and, and like, to your point about product design, product designers were facing similar challenges to the challenges that I was facing, in that there was level issues. There was, you know, career path issues that needed to be ironed out, but there was more than one of them to consider. And so it was easier for patterns to be deduced. It was easier for reuse to be a thing in preparing those folks. You couldn’t do that with a single person. So yeah, I, I just, I became the sore thumb in the taxonomy. Jesse: I think that your position as an outlier in the organization is really important and it’s, and especially in smaller organizations, there are a lot of people in design roles who are the only person who does what they do and are constantly having to explain it to people and so forth. I don’t want to diminish that aspect of it, but there’s another thing here that I think is also really important, which is you’re right: it may not be a failure on any individual leader’s part, but every organization has a leadership. It has expectations of how a leader is going to show up no matter who you are. It doesn’t matter how new you are to the organization. Those expectations are going to be present. How effectively the organization and culture rates its leaders with its values of leadership is a sort of a systemic failure of leadership, I think. And one of those breakdown points, and I have heard this from women over and over again, who did not even take six months off, was that you are, you go on family leave. You are out of sight, out of mind. And importantly, no effort is made on the other end to reintegrate you to bring you back into the organization. And for women leaders, especially if you’ve had your leadership responsibilities sort of doled out to other people, it can be very difficult to step back in and sort of reassert the value that you bring. And again, I think that does come back to the, to the culture of leadership and the willingness of leadership to take responsibility and take active steps to reintegrate people back into the organization when they’d been on leave like that. But I’m curious about something else because you, you, you said you had stepped into a product management role for a little while, and I’m curious about how that changed your perspective on, or maybe your relationships with product managers after that. Abby: Oh yeah, yeah, no, I actually, when I wrote the proposal to do a, we call it a rotation because I wasn’t ready to let go of my job title fully. I just, I wanted to do another job for a little while and see what that was like. So we wrote this rotation and one of the points in the proposal was that I wanted to have more empathy for product managers in my own practice, but also as a senior leader on the design team, I wanted to bring that product manager empathy and perspective into the design community at Etsy, because there was definitely, you know, an, an us versus them thing, a-brewin’ between product and design, as is quite common. And yeah, that was actually a really great experience for me. I mean, I mostly learned that your incentives change really quickly. Your incentive changes from as an IA, my incentive is very much clarity. Like increasing clarity is the sort of highest level metric. However you want to measure that. But as a PM, it was much different. It wasn’t about clarity. It was definitely about like serving a lot of different needs and doing it in a certain timeframe, which is a completely different of yeah. Then when I had been working with and I think I, I thought that I could shield myself from that switch or at least kind of like maintain both incentives in mind at the same time. But that doesn’t happen because you have the same number of hours in the day as every other PM in that org, and there’s a lot of work to actually get done. And so yeah, very quickly I started to notice like, oh wow, I’m making decisions on a completely different set of criteria now. And that was really great. That was, I mean, I knew for years working with product people that, that they were doing that, but I had never had to do it myself. And once I had to do it myself, I had a whole new understanding of sort of the, the emotional baggage that comes along with owning something like that in an org is different than the emotional baggage of helping people make sense of the thing they own. So yeah, I, I learned that I don’t want to be a product manager and that product manager should be better at IA ’cause, it’s a neat skill set to, to knit into an already very valuable space. Jesse: How is the emotional baggage different for product managers? How’s their relationship to the problem different? Abby: There’s a lot of times, at least in my experience, there’s a lot of times where the data and the kind of wants of the organization, like the data outside of the org and the data inside the org are not necessarily in alignment. And your gut really is the way that you have to go forward and taking those chances and making those bets, it’s something that I was really comfortable advising other people on doing, but having to do it yourself, like having to decide, oh, I’m going to ship that feature to these millions of users and have this thing happen potentially as a result. Like that was just a different scale of responsibility than I’ve ever had in any of my roles. Because like I said, the person I’m usually working for is the one making those calls. I’m just an input. As we think of you take it on the RACI ind– index, I was never responsible. You know, I was always just the, an informant. And yeah, I didn’t, I did not like it in that capital R place. No, not at all. Jesse: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I’ve heard people from both sides, from both the design side and the product management side, advocate for product management coming from more of a, of a, of a user-oriented user-centered lens. And I wonder, given your experiences, what advice would you have for product managers who want to, like, juice up their practice with a little bit more user-centeredness. Abby: I mean, I hate to be self-serving with this question, but I kind of would tell them to make more diagrams. Like I found in my time at Etsy as a product manager, that like, that was the thing that made people be like, oh my gosh, she knows what she’s talking about. She has a picture of the thing and a designer didn’t have to make it for her. Like that was very valuable. And I think a lot of product managers shy away from those kinds of methods because they belong to design or they belong to research. But I’ve, I’ve actually found a lot of value in using diagrammatic technique to, to get strategy across. And to really like anchor people on where we’re going with this whole thing. I mean, honestly, make more Gantt charts and who, who, who are running these projects with no project plans? Like this is, this is just a thing that needs to be taken care of. It’s like, we have tools for this and they’re not just useful for making interfaces for users. They’re also useful for making projects that move people through complex challenges. So yeah. Use ’em. Peter: Well, I mean, it, it, that resonates… Abby: To like the people on your team are your users as a product manager. And I don’t, I don’t think enough people kind of make that leap. You know, you have so many different users that you have to keep in mind. You have to keep the end-users in mind, obviously, but you also have to keep your, your team as your users, ’cause you’re, you’re leading them to make the thing. You’re not actually making the thing yourself. And that’s, that’s shared with IA, that, that part I was very comfortable with. But yeah, I think, I think that would be my biggest advice is like, know that your team members are your users and make them more pictures, yeah. Peter: Well, I gave a talk a few years ago, at the last time we could all be together, IA conference about how I couldn’t have written, or the way I wrote Org Design for Design Orgs was it, was very much rested on a foundation of information architecture. And in my org design work, my ability to diagram these things gets me farther along than others, just because I can, like, I’m not afraid of sketching out kind of how it might, how it might operate in a, in a visual way. And that that’s like this power we have that others could probably have, and this is probably what you’ve been writing about. But, but which for some reason many others are kind of hesitant to use. I had a question I wanted to go back to. I found myself, I’m trying to think just how idiosyncratic you are and it might be highly, right? But, but the way… Abby: high. Yeah. Peter: Right, right. The, ’cause… Jesse: poor Abby. Peter: Well… Abby: I prefer for, for the record, I prefer persnickety. Peter: Well, no, I mean, by idiosyncratic, not persnickety, not like curmudgeonly or anything like that, what I mean is “a case of one,” right? And as I started applying my org brain to this stuff, you know, w- w- what you realize is that organizations are made of people and people are all cases of one. And that however separate or unique you felt within that structure at Etsy, there, there was probably a lens you could take where it’s like, oh, you’re just part of this team, but no one quite knew how to, how to approach it from that angle. They were approaching it with whatever their assumption was. And then there was this thing that we’ve added to it, as opposed to, oh, if we incorporate the kinds of things that Abby is doing into this larger stew there’s another way of thinking about it, that you feel that you’re just part of the team and it just flows. But my thought, I found myself wondering if you. So, engineering also has an architecture function and probably has some weirdos over there who, who find themselves doing the kind of work that not everyone else in engineering is doing, but is valuable and systemic in ways that you are doing work that is valuable and systemic. And I’m wondering if you had connections with anybody like that at Etsy and what you saw about them as professionals that you either were like, why like, couldn’t I, couldn’t I be set up in my org or in my context, more like they’re set up in theirs. Was there a model there that, that you could learn from, or did you try, or just kind of curious what you saw with that? Abby: Yeah, no, there was a lot of learning coming from the engineering org. So when I, when I got to Etsy the level that I had and the title that I had was not seen in design yet. So having staff in design had not happened. And so all of the specification about that level actually started from engineering and engineering is like the sort of like backbone of that culture. So they have a really, really detailed way of looking at career paths and leveling. And that was something that through my entire time at Etsy, there was sort of like this want to have a similar version in design. But to be honest, it always started to fall down in that specialist versus generalist conversation of like, if you are a product designer at Etsy, but you don’t have full stack skills, what is your position? Like, are you a specialist? Do you get traded only on to teams that have that particular need? Like how is that all kind of going to come together? And so the team that I found myself on by the time I left was the structured data team. Ripe with engineers. And you know, we didn’t even have a designer until a month before I left that project. So it was very much kind of like finding people that were very close to my own kind. I wouldn’t call them weirdos. I call them very cool people that care about data. But it was a really messy environment where like I could, I could give them a perspective that was an additional layer on top of the perspective they already had about a pretty big move they wanted to make from a data standpoint, from traditional taxonomies to more of an ontology type of system for, for product understanding. And so there was a lot of opportunities for me to see, like, how do architects work when it is on the engineering side? And what I found was the difference really was about people understanding what they do. People understand what a data architect does. They understand because they literally own these tables full of data that other people need to do their jobs. ‘ cause, I didn’t have that concretized thing that I own, that became like, well, what do you do if you can’t own words. That’s not a job. You can’t just own all structures. That’s not a job. So in a culture that is very much about ownership, engineers had very clear ownership and I didn’t. Where product design actually has pretty clear ownership. They own the interface. Sometimes they even build it depending on who the product designer is. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot to learn from engineers about how to support specialty through education of the rest of the company, but also about like making it tangible, like taking the thing that somebody does and, and making it clear in a tangible way. So people see it as something they can apply to their project or their thinking, which I was doing just like one person at a time over and over again. As opposed to like something taken from the organization. And I don’t know if it’s necessary, you know, like I think that another part of the problem space is that a lot of IA work is done by people of different functions. So what is the challenge that comes along that is too big for an IA that is also playing product designer or product manager? That, that became a real question because it’s not like the product projects don’t have me on it don’t have IA, they all have IA. It’s just whether or not they have a need for a specialist to segment that function away from product design or partner with product design to get it done. And I did projects in both of those camps where it’s sort of like more of a handoff because of resourcing or more of a collaboration. And, you know, both of them worked for what they were supposed to. But it’s still confusing. Peter: I mean, think we have a model for that, pretty robust model for that, with UX research. And I dunno how it was practiced at Etsy, right? But I, I, I operate under the assumption that product designers should be doing research. But that you have, and so, so then that leads to the question, well, What do UX researchers do? And they’re doing meatier, heavier, broader, deeper research pro- programs that you– a designer, wouldn’t make sense for them to do. And those researchers are also enabling designers and others in doing better research. Abby: Yeah, very similar.. Jesse: I think the difference is that research, researchers don’t touch shipping product. You know, you can set up huge elaborate research programs and they can go off on their own and be their own thing. Whereas an IA, if they’re going to have any impact at all, they need to be in the weeds. They need to be in your data structures, which means that they need to be more integrated with your delivery. Abby: Yeah. Yeah. And I ended up doing a lot of my own research at Etsy but also helping to upskill the user research team on IA methods within research. I mean, card sorts, treejack, that kind of thing was just very foreign. At that point they hadn’t used that, that sort of thing. Peter: Was there ever a thought– so I’m getting into problem solving, and you can tell me that that’s not a constructive place to be– but was there a thought that instead of Abby, the staff information architect, it’s Abby, the staff designer with an information architecture specialty where Abby, as I’m assuming staff designers, like when I, when I help companies figure out this role in other organizations, a staff or, or principal designer is still leading a design initiative, often has other designers who don’t report to them, but kind of that they direct, right? And so that it feels like you were this kind of, this, this isotope kind of bouncing around, but could you not have been a team lead on an IA heavy project? Abby: yeah, no, absolutely. I could have been. Yeah, no, if I, I… Peter: But that, that that didn’t come up… Abby: The, the actual structuring of that was talked…. It was talked about in terms of like, you know, at some point or in the next year or so. And meanwhile, you know, my professional identity and self-esteem was hanging in the balance, so yeah. That, that could have happened. But there’s also reasons I didn’t stick around to see if it would happen. A lot, a lot of like, yeah, great idea. We’ll get to that. But also knowing that like, yeah, I was like this hot potato, but I was a very small potato in the potato farm. Do you know what I mean? There’s a lot of big, bigger things to figure out. So, so… Jesse: A small, very hot potato. Peter: And the ship of Theseus. I mean, I. I need to, I now need to write a blog post about the Ship of Theseus in, in, in this context because it’s, it’s, it’s real. And it means that people get lost in the cracks, right? You there’s, the people fall through. And if there’s not a good structure in place to kind of buoy them along while all that swirl is happening, you get a lot of, I’m sure you were not the only person who fell through the cracks in, in this instance. And that’s I mean, it, it, it unpacks a whole set of issues. I was on a a conversation recently on a Twitter space where we were talking about design levels. And I said that… there was a, I don’t know, it wasn’t an argument or a debate, but there’s kind of two perspectives when it comes to an employee’s professional development. To what degree is that the manager’s responsibility, because the manager really understands the lay of the land. They understand this, the, the opportunities. They’re more experienced, they’ve been in the industry longer, et cetera. So what role do they have in guiding a direct report in navigating that and to what, to, what degree is that the responsibility of the employee? Like, because, as your experience was, managers change, people change, like w- we need to empower the individuals to be able to make their call and, and figure out how to make their, put their paths forward. The problem with that is if we do it in most companies, at this point, we would just be, we would have all these, you know, fairly novice designers, just struggling, because there’s not a clear understanding of what that possibility is. And that’s why you need managers, but there’s this… Abby: yeah… Peter: …there’s a brokenness here that we need to address, I think, somewhat kind of systemically, institutionally across companies, in- industry-wide, figuring out, how do we help people get a sense of what it means to develop themselves professionally, absent of maybe you got lucky and you got a really good manager, but most people don’t have that. And so how do we, how do we encourage that kind of growth or support that kind of growth? Abby: I also find myself having to tell quite a number of mid-level people that there’s two different ladders, one for management, and one for individual contribution, and that they need to pick one at different points of their career, but that like those ladders are not stacked on top of each other. It’s not like you get all the way through the individual contributor ladder, and then you start on the manager ladder. Good managers are actually not made that way. They’re… bad managers are made that way, where you get so senior in a practitioner’s sense, you start managing other practitioners. I mean, I did that for several years and I mean, I’m… for anybody listening that, that reported to me, I’m so sorry, because it just was not my skillset. I was totally set up to fail. And I feel like a lot of managers in the design space, are in exactly that position, which makes sense, because you know, is a an industry that was inventing itself as it was also making huge staffing promises to global corporations. So yeah, we got a whole lot of designers in seats that are really talented designers, but are kind of shitty managers. And then you got newer managers learning from those people. I mean, it’s, it is a systemic problem. It absolutely is. I think it was interesting, Peter, when you were listing off, you know, what managers have, you listed a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve never had a manager that had. More experience than me that, okay, cool, I want to have that. I really want to have that lead. Somebody who has more experience doing what I do hire me and be my manager, instead of telling me that I’m my own manager and to check in with you every two weeks. You know, I mean, this is getting me hot under the collar, but seriously, like I think the management lack in this industry, yeah, it destroys people. I’ve seen many junior designers leave our industry because they can’t find a manager that can treat them like a human being. So… Jesse: Well, and it drives people out of Abby: too. I’d love to see that fixed. Yeah. Jesse: Yeah. I mean, it burns out the managers too, because to your point, they are not prepared for what they’re getting into. They have not been supported by their organizations in growing skill sets other than design. And even those skillsets usually they’ve had to invest in developing on their own. So… Abby: I think about imposter syndrome with, with people in those positions. ‘Cause it’s, it’s one of those unique positions where you’re like, oh no, no, no, that’s not a syndrome. You are in fact an imposter. You do not know how [garbled] that you, yeah. Oh, you’re not sleeping well at night? I completely understand that. We’ve ,we’ve all had friends in those positions, I’m sure. Over the years of just like, how the heck did I get myself in this position where I’m in charge of people instead of doing the thing I’m good at? I think that it can very easily happen. Jesse: Yeah. So again, I think that it comes back to, for the, for the people that I coach, it comes back to like, can you change your circumstances, can you find new ones and in your case, you went out and you created new circumstances for yourself as an independent consultant once more. How is that different now for you? Different from how you were a consultant before? What, what, how has your practice evolved? Where are you now? Abby: Well, I’m going to burst the bubble. Since I left Etsy I have done zero hours of consulting. Jesse: Oh, wow. Okay. Nevermind then. Abby: No, I am. I am not on the market as a consultant. If, if you were to reach out to me in my inbox and offered me a project, most likely I’m going to, I’m going to tell you, I got people I can send you to. No, I, I left, and remembered I was a writer and I started writing and I fell in love with what I was writing and I kept writing. And so, yeah, we’re, we’re 16 months into me deciding I’m a writer now… Peter: How do you make money? Abby: How do I make money? I make money off of the book that I wrote because of royalties, I make money from giving talks for people that want to hear what I have to say about information architecture, or more recently diagrams. I have an Etsy shop where I sell templates of deliverables that I’ve found to be useful and thought leadership pieces that I find of value. Peter: How does your income compare as an independent to what it was? Abby: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Nothing. Peter: Okay. so you are much happier, I take it, but far… Poor, far less well compensated. Abby: Yes, far less well compensated is a great way to put it. Yeah. I defined what enough is. And I realized that the enough I was getting from the six-figure income of a high level job in tech was destroying my creative spirit and not giving me the life I wanted. So yeah. I make a whole lot less money and I… Peter: so you’re a shitty capitalist. Abby: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no I, yeah. Peter: I mean you’re Abby: Am I a shitty capitalist? Peter: not, that’s probably not right. Abby: I’m a really good capitalist, Peter. Right? I’ve Peter: mean, you all of your means of production. You are. Abby: I’ve reduced my hours and, and you know, I can, I can pay my bills, but I don’t have to go to work every day. Like what, what is bad about this capitalist situation? Absolutely nothing. So. Jesse: So you’ve been writing about diagrams. Abby: Yeah, I’m writing a whole book about diagramming. It’s very exciting. It’s such a skillset that has gotten done a disservice. I feel like as industries have kind of piled on the use of it, but no one is sort of zooming out and going like, Hey guys, this is a thing that we all do. Maybe we should like, talk about that and have a way that we learn to do that thing. So yeah, I’m writing a book that I hope, hope is that way. Peter: There’s books, like Back of the Napkin and the work of Dan roam. There’s what Christina Wodtke did a, I forget what she calls her book… Jesse: Pencil Me In. Peter: Pencil Me In. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. There’s, you know, th- th- there’s been attempts at li– or Linda Barry, right, has about kind of, how do we, how do we get, yeah, I, I’m wondering kind of two questions that might be related. Hopefully they are. Like, what is your angle, kind of distinct maybe from, from any of the ones we’ve said. And I’m curious how, if, if you’ve seen, context shift over the last couple of years, particularly as companies are starting to adopt things like these digital whiteboards, your Miros and Murals, and even Figmas as a Figjams or whatever, like, like, is it, and is that aligned with kind of what you’re like this, this breath of, of energy or no, that’s a mixed metaphor, but this, this burst of energy that you have with, with writing and, and, and your approach, is it tied to some context change that we are a part of? Anyway, yeah. Abby: Yeah, so I mean, my specific bent on diagramming is that I want to teach people to diagram. I don’t want to talk about diagrams. I don’t want to point at pretty diagrams. I don’t want to make historical references to diagrams that have done specific jobs in the past. Although I have done that in examples here and there throughout the book as interesting fodder but I really want to focus on teaching people how to diagram. Specifically when they’re not coming from a place of learning it somewhere else, along the way. So like all of us came through information architecture. I learned to diagram from something that Jesse wrote. And so I feel like that’s, that’s something that like, we all had that gift. And I don’t know if this happens to you all, but like diagramming is my superpower. Like not just in my professional life, but like in my life life, like people who are my friends outside of design have been in awe of diagrammatic abilities. And it’s not like big fancy diagrams. This is like little like lowercase D diagram, you know, like a little, a little sketch that you make on a piece of paper to explain something or something you jump up on the whiteboard to do. But when I think about my students, there is this kind of like, I’m not a designer, I’m not a visual person diagramming isn’t for me. And I think books like Christina’s gave them a vocabulary of like hand drawn elements that they can use to bust out of that kind of void of not thinking they have the creative ability. But I think that the thing that we still lack is a process that you can give to a person that they can grok all of the different pieces of making a diagram and also know when the thing is good and when it’s done and understanding that that doesn’t mean it’s pretty. And that doesn’t mean that it’s fancy or that it’s like heavily visually designed, which I think is kind of like a mistake that a lot of people make. So yeah, I’m, I’m hoping that this is a book that actually teaches people how to diagram. It’s, it’s very much a textbook. It has a lot of really good stories of how diagrams have helped real people, which I think is also really interesting. But I think the, the commonality to your second point about like the current tool set of diagramming is that we rely a lot on templates, but the templates are not the stories that are actually out there that are blowing people’s minds about what diagrams can do. It’s when you take the journey map and you decide to use it in this other way, that it’s interesting. It’s not necessarily always like following the letter of the law for the diagram sake or the template sake, but that is what I see a lot of in terms of thought leadership of like, here is a template of a diagram or here’s a canvas. Here’s how you fill out this canvas. And I think that that’s super useful. Like, I think that’s useful the way that like weeknight dinner recipes are super useful, but there are times where you’re trying to do something that is unique to your circumstance and finding the template is a lot less important than just like starting the diagram. And so that’s the main point I’m trying to get across to folks, is like diagram your own way. And see all these templates as more, you know, a box of tools that you can go to if you have easy problems, but know that like the right way is often somewhere between those recipes. So, yeah, it takes like more of a, a rigor to the craft of it as like a thing, as opposed to like, I know how to make this one kind of diagram and I just make it over and over and over again, which I see a lot of people do, you know, people were like, I learned how to make a journey diagram at a conference talk and now I make them all the time. There’s other diagrams that might be more helpful. There’s also other things they could do to the journey that would make it maybe more helpful that they don’t know because they’ve only done it to the letter of the template that they were taught. So, yeah, that’s, that’s the fun of my life right now that and Google document comments. Peter: Yeah, I know I it’s, as you’re saying this, like I’m, like, the diagrams that we did have in the book or that I have on my blog posts and or that I use in my talks. And I am both sheepish about them, because I’m not a good drawer and I’m not a good illustrator, Peter: graphic designer, but I consider kind of my diagramming, like my version of outsider art, like it’s just kind of from my own brain, as opposed to like any, any, any, any grounding in how to do this stuff, but it seems to connect and resonate with an audience. People seem to appreciate it. Abby: Well, there’s diagrams in all of our minds, you know, all day long, we have diagrams in our minds that we’re just not putting out there and people are drawing them all the time with their hands. When they’re talking about things too. I mean, Peter, you have drawn several diagrams in this conversation where you’re like, I’ve got this thing over here and I’ve got this thing over here and there. And it’s like, that’s a diagram. It’s whether or not you choose to get it out of your head and share it with the rest of us that sort of the… so. In the, in the book, I had to define the word diagram and that was probably the most challenging part to kind of get it started. And what I came up with was that a diagram is “a visual representation that’s helpful to someone.” And sometimes that someone is you. And I think that, like, by that definition, there’s a lot of work in this world that’s done by diagrams. But is there a lot of sharing of insights across that? Not really. We’re pretty locked up on those templates and those process standards and such. So yeah, I’m going to unlock a little bit of that, I hope. Jesse: Very exciting. I love the idea of using your newfound freedom to empower others with new tools. Abby: It’s it’s the most fun and hardest thing I’ve ever done, so, yeah. Peter: What, is there timeline for when we’ll see the fruits of your labor? Abby: So one of the, one of the like big creative decisions, I’ll call it, that I made, was to not define a release date for this book. Because I did that my first time around and I was off by a month and I really beat myself up about it. I don’t think anybody gave a crap really, but I did. And I’ve been thinking a lot about kind of what we’ve gone through as a world and what I’ve personally been through over the last couple of years. And like, I don’t want to set up a situation where I’m pushing myself to get this thing out by a certain time. So yeah, I- I’ve given myself permission to not know when my book will be done. But man, that Gantt chart is getting smaller and smaller every day. Like holy cow, we’re. Peter: Like the horizon line’s coming closer and… Abby: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s written, it’s sitting here on my desk, so I mean, it’s, it’s a book. It’s just… it needs to be, it needs to be line edited further. It needs to be designed. It needs to be indexed, which is the most fun part. I cannot wait. I’m currently writing a lexicon for the back of the book. We’re working on the back matter. I hired a friend of mine, who’s a research librarian, Jenny Benevento, to write an academic paper for this book about the historical discourse on diagramming over time. And so we’re currently going through edits on that. So yeah, this is a beefier book than the first book. And I’m excited about that part of it. I keep adding things to it because I’m my own publisher, so why not? So we’ll see, we’ll see, when it comes out, we’ll see how big it is. “I’ll let you know,” is the main marketing message. You’re right. I’m a terrible capitalist. Peter. This is the worst marketing. So, when is this book we’re really excited about coming out? When can we give you our money? I have no idea. I’ll let you know. Peter: But in the meantime, people should be following you at abbycovert.com and are there other means by which people that you encourage social media stalking? Abby: I am fine with social media stalking, but I’m very boring on the social media. I just don’t, I don’t go there. I don’t post there. I have a mailing list that I’ve been sending out once a month about my process and what I’m thinking about and what I’m working on. So yeah, I would say that’s the number one thing if you want to stay in touch with my work and also support my my efforts, that’s the way to do it. That’s the metric that I’m paying the most attention to at the moment is… Peter: …is a mailing list, subscribers. Abby: And how many people care when I say something to my mailing list, once a month, is a really important number to me. Because I, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a, there’s a gap between what social media was able to provide to me as a content creator maybe five, seven years ago, and what it can provide now. And so I’m, I’m kind of grappling with what that, that gap is and how to fill it. So email, let’s go back to email everybody, but everybody likes more emails… Peter: what’s your, what’s your ICQ? Abby: It’s hardcore hybrid no it’s not…. That’s not true. You may… Jesse: Thank you so much. This has been great. Abby: This was awesome. Thank you for inviting me. This was really fun. I’m glad y’all are back to this. Cool. Jesse: Thank you. We’re glad to. Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @jjg. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com. 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Transcript  ¶This transcript is auto-generated. We try to clean it up, but quirks remain. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. ¶ Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, ¶ Together: And we’re finding our way… ¶ Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.  ¶ Jesse: On today’s show, recently graduated master’s student Gordon Ching joins us to share some of the highlights of his thesis work, in which he studied a number of Chief Design Officers and other senior design executives. We talk about the challenges faced by the most senior design leaders, the career experiences that made them successful and the skills that enable them to take on new challenges. Peter: With us today is Gordon Ching, Canadian design strategist and management thinker based in San Francisco. He’s currently leading the design operations at Fast and is a founder of something called the Design Executive Council, which I want to hear more about. He graduated… just graduated with a master’s degree in design management from the Savannah College of Art and Design where he wrote a thesis on Chief Design Officers and design executive effectiveness. Try to say, “design executive effectiveness,” three times fast. ¶ Gordon: Hey. ¶ Peter: Well, and I’m the one who brought Gordon into the conversation today. He and I met months ago now on Twitter, when I found out he was doing this research on “What does it mean to be a Chief Design Officer and design executive?” I slid into his DMs and said, “Dude, you got to talk to me.” We had a conversation and then since that time we’ve stayed in touch because we’re both strangely obsessed with this role of design leadership, design executives, being a design executive. Is there actually such a thing as a Chief Design Officer? Is that just branding? And so we, we continued to compare notes as we, as we go along. So, I think, honestly, where we want to start, Gordon, is just like, Who are you? And how did you end up getting a master’s degree in studying what does it mean to be a design executive? ¶ Gordon: How I got into this was, in the heat of the pandemic when we’re all locked at home, and I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs in my day job, wondering, I need to do something with this time. I want to learn something new. And I also wanted to tap into something I’m really passionate about. And the question here I was asking myself is just how do we make creativity work at scale. ¶ And that eventually led me to discovering, “Hey, there’s roles out there, there are people out there, who are thinking about this every day”, but there’s also programs out there that are looking at this question mark. And I love saying the word “creativity,” because I don’t think it’s just about design. It’s also about marketing. It’s also about writing. It’s all forms of creativity. And I think that the role of designers a lot of times play the central role in shepherding creativity within an organization. So, I discovered the program at SCAD and was really delighted to see that there was an actual program focusing more on the design management angle of design and not just purely from an interaction standpoint. ¶ So that’s how I got into SCAD. And it’s just been an absolute pleasure to have met some wonderful professors there that have really been at the heart of design management before we were practicing, or at least I was practicing design. ¶ Peter: Right. I, I met one of your professors, I’m spacing on his name, but the sense I got is, through SCAD, you were able to connect kind of, not just with digital design leaders, which is the universe that Jesse and I are a part of, but you were able to connect with design leaders in marketing or physical products, like, what was the landscape of, you know, so you interviewed all these folks for this thesis, like who were you talking to, and how many, and what, what are some of the kind of attributes of, of these folks? Just, just so that, you know, the folks listening can get a sense of the shape of what it is we’re going to be talking about. ¶ Gordon: So I talked to folks, uh, it was really focused first and foremost on software. That was really my angle at first because I’m in Silicon Valley, I’m working in technology, and I knew digital design specifically was really taking a driving seat in shaping the future of the design. However, just by nature of talking to these design chiefs in software-focused companies, I also came across companies like AT&T, Logitech, folks that are outside the direct sphere of what we might go on in Silicon Valley. ¶ So that really helped me open my eyes because we’re not only talking about design from a pure digital lens, but also design companies that have a hardware angle, you know, spanning from creating computer products and electronics, to washing machines over at Electrolux. So, it’s quite a range of how creativity works at scale in different mediums and disciplines through design. ¶ So, a lot of this was thinking through creativity at scale and where are these people practicing such scale? So, the first rung of people that we really spoke to was from public companies, really large design organizations with shareholder responsibility. So, you’re thinking about design organizations that are hundreds of people, if not thousands. All the way down to more unicorn type startups, where you can be more design-centric from the very beginning. So, it’s kind of two different questions of, What does it mean to drive design at a company where design perhaps was not there from the very beginning and has now scaled and become a legacy component of making design work, to companies that are design-first from the very beginning, and what does that look like if you were to do that from the very start, with a more blank canvas? So that’s kind of the spread and we’re talking about. 16 different design executives representing public and private companies all at relatively large scales of design. And I think this group could represent some of the largest and most influential practitioners of our current generation. ¶ Jesse: So, what were those, you know, you talked about the, the breadth and the differences amongst all of these of all these different practitioners across all of these different fields, all these different leaders. What were some of the commonalities that you found among these leaders and the challenges that they faced?¶ Gordon: The number one was, everyone is still figuring it out. There was no textbook answer on just what we’re really doing here. But what was really interesting is because the language kind of shifts from person to person, as a researcher, I was really trying to tease out what are the patterns that we were seeing even though different languages were being used. ¶ And I think this is also where Peter also has a really interesting vantage point as a consultant, in being to see these variances but also patterns at the same time. So, one of the things I think I was really learning is there’s a very select group within the interview group that I think are at the forefront of what design leadership looks like and are really molding these new practices, new mindsets, new behaviors, and competencies of what it means to be an effective design leader at that level at the very frontier, almost like the tip of the iceberg. ¶ But there’s also folks who’ve been practicing for decades and they come also with a set of mental models of what they view as effective design leadership. So, we’re seeing some tension, actually, between what people view as effective design leadership, and the kind of two camps that I kind of saw, there was really one is leaning much heavier from a business-first angle. And, there’s another camp that I might argue is a little bit more legacy, which is taking a camp of, “We’re artists and creators first,” And we drive through that mind. So, you can see how these two forces are actually in many ways complementary but it depends also which of these camps they choose to use as the front-facing motives. ¶ Peter: I’m wondering. So, as you say, that I can imagine folks, kind of that older guard, leading through creativity, the folks who’ve been reading the Design Management Journal for the last 30 years, who, like, there’s I guess what I’m wondering is, like the, the context in which they’re operating, which is… which might be different from the context that you’re seeing from some of these more business-driven designers, right? So, some of these folks who are a bit more legacy, in order to be a Chief Design Officer or a design executive for the last 25 years, you… that’s very rare, which means the company you’re working for was probably pretty strange to, to even kind of think that this was viable. And so what was it, was there anything you saw in terms of that, versus these more modern design leaders, where kind of now every big company realizes they need to have design executives, but they haven’t really shaped their, their company or culture necessarily to accommodate it. They’re just doing it because it’s now considered a standard, you know, if not standard practice, emerging practice. ¶ And I’m wondering if that, if those contexts, in which these Chief Design Officers were operating, what you saw in terms of, I don’t know, likelihood to succeed or, or the way that they lead kind of differing based on these different contexts. ¶ Gordon: I think one angle to think about is, is both from an angle of growth, time, and debt. And for companies who have existed a very long time without that kind of design leader at place, there’s a lot of administrative debt or political debt, organizational debt of just, how do you set up design to be effective and delivering at scale in those organizations. ¶ And those types of design leaders are a different… a different breed of design leaders who have to do different sets of responsibilities because they’re dealing with so much more debt within the organization versus organizations that might be more design native, who might not have that debt to carry on, as they’re performing as a design executive. ¶ So, both of these worlds will ask, have, very different responsibilities and the mindset of how they operate. And I think one, one example I think about is, I know we’ve used Apple as an icon for the longest time, and it’s kind of been the textbook reference point for what design leadership looks like. ¶ However, most companies are just not set up that way. It’s almost like a unicorn of its own. And I actually think it’s not healthy, particularly to use that exact example across the whole industry, because all these other companies are not shaped like that, are not competing like that. So, I think there’s a whole separation to start thinking about just what are the different layers of cultures that you’re navigating as a design executive and how do you match the conditions in which you need to perform to be effective in making design happen? ¶ Jesse: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I think that a lot of what makes Apple a unique example in that way is really the relationship that existed between Ive and Jobs in the product development process. That tight partnership between Jobs who was effectively a head of product as CEO of that company, and Jobs and Ive kind of working in these tight creative cycles, especially early in concept development. Whereas a lot of organizations are just not set up to include design at that level. In part, you know, as you’re pointing out, it’s, it’s an organizational challenge, but also comes back to the relationships between the leaders and the credibility that those leaders have been able to gain, in order to earn themselves a C-level title. And so I’m curious about your thoughts about the C-level title and the weight that that bears and whether every organization is even necessarily ready for a C-level design person. ¶ Gordon: I think what’s interesting about that comment, is I think about when you really dissect the meaning behind the Chief Design Officer, both from a symbolic, but also from a, from a governance level, in an organization, a lot of these Chief Design Officer titles are actually quite symbolic, meaning they’re not actually directly in the, C-suite like a COO, a CFO, a CEO. ¶ They may not even be reporting to a CEO. The majority of Chief Design Officers that we see today are perhaps one degree or two degrees removed from the CEO directly. And rather they are representatives, figureheads, and the ultimate authority maker on design, but they still have some layers between the CEO. ¶ So that still shows there is some ways to go to thinking about design as an equal peer to other functions that are directly in C-suite because at this level, the design chief, and also it’s contingent on the relationships that they have on how they push through decisions on how they, you know, make something happen, and whether they have those resources to actually bring those things. There’s a very small subset of Chief Design Officers who have a direct reporting line to the CEO and also actually interface with the board. And that demands a very different level of responsibilities of the Chief Design Officer and how much they are managing up versus how much are they managing downwards into the organization. ¶ So I think that’s a really important distinction because I think when we say Chief Design Officer, we can automatically assume it’s a C-level role. But I think as Peter has also highlighted in my conversation with him, is that you have CMOs, you have Chief Privacy Officers, you have Chief Legal Officers who might not sit at that level, but they are still representing the most senior authority figure on that function and decision-making. ¶ Peter: I’m curious though, as you, you mentioned, you did engage with a few of these Chief Design Officers who were legit C-suite members and that it felt like that job was significantly different, even from a design executive role, like a VP or SVP of design. What, what behaviors or activities or mindsets, what was the, that quantum leap from being a design executive to actually being a true Chief Design Officer?¶ Gordon: One thing I think about is, when you start to enter the C-suite, what are those duties in that world? Who are you really accountable to at that point? And I think about when you’re applying a, let’s say, a customer centric or design lens, let’s say in a board meeting, how does that actually unfold? What’s the type of language? What’s the type of financial literacy and business acumen that you need to exercise to even be credible in those spaces? Are you showing up to talk about craft or actually showing up to talk about trade-offs in business decision-making? So, I think there’s a really important leap here where design chiefs have established a team that they trust to take care of a lot of the downwards responsibilities so that they can make time and effort to influence upwards at the highest levels of business decision making. ¶ And so I think there’s an important leap there of just from both a mindset level, but also, can you read financial statements? Can you understand how those decisions are made and how to work around that and actually push for your investment? So there is a definite leap there from both a skillset perspective. ¶ And I think what’s interesting for us as designers, as we’re not coming from any sort of training from an education standpoint, to learn how to do that stuff. So we almost have to do double duty to learn these skills and to adapt as we’re leading at the same time. So I think there’s a very prime and difficult challenge actually for design chiefs to make that jump, if you haven’t had those trainings and skills, ¶ Jesse: I work at now as a leadership coach and this kind of skills development is very much part of the conversations that I’m having with folks all the time. You mentioned that there were some of the leaders that you surveyed, who really represented what you described as the tip of the iceberg, the folks who were kind of at the forefront of, of practice and I’m wondering about their skills and what skills they might be bringing, that the folks who are not quite out there on the frontier, as you put it, might not yet have developed that they might need to develop if they want to be out there on that. ¶ Gordon: One of the areas I highlight is the word ownership. And how close is that executive to owning a business? So, one example of this is one of the Chief Design Officers I talked to. She owns a P&L responsibility. That’s quite rare. Most design leaders do not own a P&L responsibility. So I think in my head, what does it mean when a designer actually owns that? How much more accountability do they have under that decision-making scope and the type of influence that they can exert on the organization? So, when I think about that lens from a financial and accountability and ownership perspective, that’s one of the tips that we started to see. Another tip that we’ve seen, I think is connected to that is understanding from a financial scope point of view. How are you influencing decision-making at the C-suite level when they’re reviewing these types of pieces of information that delve very deep into financial areas, but at the same time, what’s interesting is some Chief Design Officers have said, I’m almost like a spiritual or human counterweight to the more analytical function of executives. So, you can see that there is a financial acumen part of some design chiefs that are at this tip of the spear. But at the same time, when you ask them, how are you evaluated on your effectiveness? A lot of it is still very subjective. A lot of it is seeking their unique opinions and points of view on also how they bring that customer centric mindset at the highest levels of the business. ¶ And to keep that customer mindset intact, even while decisions might be made from an analytical reasoning point of view. So, I think of it this, from this perspective where you’re not really letting go of design thinking as a mindset, rather you’re reinterpreting how to use that in a language that makes sense to executives in the C-suite. ¶ Jesse: This is interesting because I think one of the challenges that leaders are facing these days is the tendency to want to cast themselves in the role of user advocate or user defender or the voice of the user in, in decision-making and while as noble and well-intentioned as all of that is, it leads to UX leaders, design leaders, walking into the room and creating conflict that doesn’t need to be there, creating division that doesn’t need to be there. ¶ And so I’m curious about how this plays out for these high performing leaders that you studied, who do have to be that voice of advocacy, but also somehow you know, not create strife and division within the decision, I think. ¶ Gordon: I think what’s interesting about that, one is, I think about what is one of the key skills that these execs are utilizing to drive influence and change. And I think about, yes, there is that analytical part of their jobs that is now more forefront. But I also think about something very simple and human, which is how they involve these executives. ¶ One example I was given is sometimes it’s really hard to see the value of a given design change or something that happened in design, unless you see it and feel it. So what I find happening is that yes, there is that financial and analytical part of your job that has grown so much, but there’s this other part of the job that hasn’t really changed, which is how do you facilitate, how do you invite, how do you cooperate with people who may not be as familiar, but at the end of the day, they’re still human beings who can understand and explore. ¶ So, I see this playing out with folks at this altitude where they’re still exercising their facilitation skills, but perhaps in a way that is more friendly to an executive audience and keeping those objectives and targets in mind. So that, that was a really big surprise to me of seeing that kind of friendliness, building that trust, building that relationship, so that you can be almost like a yin and yang to your executive counterpart to bring in that customer point of view while keeping the context of the business in mind and not overtly, just purely focusing on the user, but keeping all those two facets in mind while you’re walking them through this experience in a facilitator. ¶ Peter: So many thoughts. So, so as, as these design leaders grow and they’re figuring out how to take the skills they have, like you just mentioned with facilitation and, and reshape it in that context, one thing I’m wondering about is, I guess there’s kind of two related questions I have. How… so something that I hear posed is, well, How different is Design executive from any other executive, aren’t they just another executive? Why, why are we so focused on VP of design as something different than VP of marketing, VP of engineering, et cetera. And I think what you just addressed kind of answers one of those things, but something else that I’ve seen as well is people still don’t really understand design and all that it can deliver. ¶ And there continues to be an evangelism and education aspect, even at that highest level, which their peers don’t have to spend a lot of time doing. Their peers, that’s, there’s, there’s an assumption of the value of marketing and how it works and the value of engineering and sales and HR and how they operate.  But they’re still not yet in most of these organizations an assumption of the value of design and an understanding of how it works. And so I’m wondering, kind of, what you saw in terms of like, if that’s true, right? If, if, if the design leaders, you talked to still feel like they are having to evangelize it, or maybe when you get to that kind of level that they’re at, there is this recognition that, okay, we get it. You don’t have, because, because if you have to still make all that, if you still have to engage in all that effort in evangelizing design and educating folks, that’s time taken away from these other executive functions that we want these leaders to do, in terms of informing vision and strategy, the facilitation work you were talking about in terms of bringing people together as they think about solving problems. ¶ So I’m wondering just how you saw, yeah, how you, how you saw that in the conversations you had.¶ Gordon: What I saw was there’s a, I think there’s a definite sea change in corporate understanding and value of design as a discipline. We’ve seen that change, and that’s also why we’re seeing more designers at the table at the highest levels. However, the specifics of what they do, how they do it is still very mysterious. ¶ And so what I find is design executives, yes, they, they have to play that role, but someone said very clearly, “I like to show, not tell.” And I think there’s a very clear difference between those two exercises of how our taking the best of the work that’s occurring in your organization and demonstrating that and its links to business success, it’s links to cross-functional excellence across the board. And I think about this because it’s like, there’s a lot of showing, but not telling. And I think the better you can tell, sorry, you need to do more showing, not telling because that raises the credibility and evidence of how design links to various aspects of business success. So, I think that importance has increased, but the specifics and the evidence has to continually be drummed up. So I think there is still that kind of theater exercise that’s going on, but more concretely and not just from a, from a, you know, “I’m just showing you how I’m just telling you how important design is, but rather I’m showing you directly how important design is.” ¶ Peter: And, and when they’re showing, when they’re showing, are they showing, “Here’s this thing that the team launched and it has evidently beautiful design and we should feel good about it,” or are they showing. Numbers and metrics and “Here’s this thing we launched and it downloads went down, went up by 48% or revenue was increased by 25%.” ¶ Like, what is the mechanism of showing? Is it showing results that feel quantified and, and in a spreadsheet? Or is it shown? Cause when I think of design and showing, I’m thinking, showing the work, showing the product, showing the reveal. So, so how, how does “show” work in this regard? ¶ Gordon: I think if you’re just showing it, that’s only one level of showing, I think you have to drill much deeper. So, an example I would think about is if, let’s say market share is a really important. How are you connecting the dots between the activities and investment in design with the objectives of the business, and basically building that bridge between potentially the mystery of what design is and what it does and the material impact it has on the business. ¶ So, I don’t think you were just walking into the room, showing an experience, but which can be felt at a human level, but to a business executive it’s like, how did this move the needle on these targets that we’ve set ourselves to for this quarter, for this year? What is the direct link between design? ¶ But I think what’s interesting here and you’ve highlighted this before is that design is only realized through collaboration. So, I don’t think it’s just designers, just showing just purely from a design point of view, but there’s a cross-functional effort. And I’ve heard many times over with these executives is that from a product-design-engineering standpoint, there’s oftentimes joint ownership of how this piece comes together to demonstrate the evidence for design’s impact across the function and across the business. ¶ Jesse: I’m curious because for so many organizations, all of this, the, the level of power and engagement and influence that design has as a function within the organization, all of that can feel really out of reach for a lot of organizations. I would say even most organizations probably because it, it’s not clear how to get from where they are to toward that vision. ¶ And I’m curious about some of those smaller scale stuff that you saw, that people who are working. Younger organizations, smaller teams who are still able to wield that influence without having to like build an empire to get there. I don’t know. Did I actually ask a question in there? I meant to, like, so, so it, it it’s like the, what’s the, what’s the what are some of the factors that come into play, that that are particular to working at a smaller scale in a smaller organization, on a younger team? ¶ Gordon: One direct example that I heard a couple of times actually at smaller companies, but also was reflected in larger companies, was shifting that mindset of being design-led versus experience-led. And this was a big shift in thinking through, hey, as design, we’re not just the total owners and the only owners of the end experience, rather as the design chief, I’m shepherding through multiple functions of how to really bring design excellence to life. ¶ And it’s changing this kind of mindset of being a little bit more territorial, to one that is actually much more facilitated in how you guide that end result. And so I saw this both in large and small companies have a mindset shift of rethinking your role and how you use that power and how that affects your peers and the trust they have in design and how they think about when to go to you, how much should they rely on you for? ¶ And so there’s this major mindset shift. I found that shifting that mindset from design to experience thinking allows the designer to even at a small company, think more cooperatively, think that any good design happens through collaboration. And you have to nail that because whether you’re a small company or a large company, if you can’t nail that collaboration piece, there’s not going to be any sort of quality product coming out of the train, right? And only going to get worse if you don’t master this skill early, because imagine now you’re dealing with thousands of stakeholders. It’s just going to blow up in your face. So I think that, that, that key piece on collaboration and just reframing how you think about how to exercise your role as a designer is really important on the result of the inexperience.¶ Jesse: I’m curious. Did you explore the backgrounds of these design leaders at all in terms of their career trajectories that brought them to design leadership? ¶ Gordon: I dug into a little bit, but it wasn’t like an extensive initiative. However, most of these folks that have this current generation of, of design executives are pretty much like they went to design school and ended up as a design executive and has held that for, for, for basically the track of their career. ¶ What I think we’re seeing though in the industry today though, is there’s a shift because of the open access to design education and much more roles available. We’re going to see a multidisciplinary mix like myself. I, I didn’t start in design. I started in marketing. So how does that shape the future of design leadership, when you start to have people from different functions enter into design and they can bring that acumen and language to help bridge design to other things. ¶ Peter: I’m wondering, even within design, something that, that comes up, you mentioned creativity earlier and I, and one of the challenges that I’ve had is, is the frame of the word “design,” because when you say “design” people have a sense of what they think it is, and it’s usually smaller than what it is that I’m trying to get at. ¶ Even creativity isn’t quite right, because I think about the role that user research,  experience research plays in these functions. And I don’t want to suggest that researchers aren’t creative, but, but the, the role that they’re playing within this context is, is to inform, develop evidence, elucidate. ¶ And so I’m wondering what you saw from this leadership perspective, and I’m kind of thinking about it from this path perspective, just like, was there anything in terms of where you started that would presuppose or predict where you were ending up or is it really like folks are coming from anywhere and in, in this next generation could end up as that, that head of design. ¶ Let me say, let me be more specific. Like, I, I hear concern from folks who practice user research that they’re not ever going to get to be a Chief Design Officer. And it’s like, they’re not, they’re not sure how do they get to be that executive? Though, you know, we both know Kaaren Hanson, I’m, I’m currently working with her, and her background is she has a PhD in social science. So, so some of these folks are there, but there seems to be this almost bias towards a certain kind of designer becoming a certain kind of design leader. And I’m wondering if, if that is a legacy that you’re seeing change in the conversations that you’ve had, ¶ Gordon: That’s a good question. It makes me wonder, is it so much more of the background of it individual to more so which disciplines hold the power to make those things happen and what they demand of that profile. So for example, we see design chiefs, but I think back then R & D used to be some sort of executive role up there, uh, what has happened. ¶ I’m not entirely sure. Do we see, ¶ Peter: You don’t hear about R & D much anymore. ¶ Gordon: So I think there’s kind of been a breakdown of these general business functions into more specialized routes and certain disciplines have had much more air time and weight around how to position themselves. So in some ways you can almost see it’s a, there’s a bit of jostling here. It’s actually not very clear of what is that? ¶ Is it a Chief Experience Officer and who would come from that? I don’t really know. But I do think that timelessness of the skill set of being able to think through at the basic level or respect of a function, what does it even mean to be an executive? What are those, then where does the layer of the functional and disciplinary area come in to intersect those executive skills? ¶ ‘Cause I think sometimes we’re asking ourselves what makes a great design executive. I think the first question is what is a great executive, layered then with design. And when you cross those together, you start to see where does design differentiate versus any other function under still the umbrella of executive? I think that’s really important to think about. ¶ Jesse: And I would add to that, that even within design, you know, as you pointed out, there were a couple of different flavors of that, that you have people who hold more of the creative vision for a product who are like, they are the, their tastes and their judgment helps determine what ships and what doesn’t. Whereas you have a kind of design leader for whom their tastes and their judgment is not relevant to what ships or what doesn’t. They are there to build systems and processes for the delivery of solid creative work on an ongoing basis. And it’s that kind of aspect of it that they’ve really taken on. ¶ I would argue there’s a third type that is a more of a kind of mentorship-oriented leader that is more oriented around talent development within their organization as a, as a primary orientation. These are some of the patterns that I’ve seen. I’m curious about some of the patterns that you might have seen in the study as well, in terms of that orientation or stance that a leader takes. ¶ Gordon: I guess in some ways it could almost be a self-preservation exercise sometimes or either you’re looking at it from almost an assembly point of view of like the talent tree. Sometimes, you know, you might be, you might not be the most proficient designer who ends up as the design chief, and that happens because they trust you for another aspect of your skills and strength. ¶ However, if you don’t complement what you you’re lacking from a, from a function and also responsibility point of view, and to have those leaders with you, then you can fail to deliver the whole value proposition of design. So I think of it from that perspective, like, hey, as an individual, as an executive, you need to be super self-aware of strengths and weaknesses and those gaps, how to place people around you that fill those gaps. ¶ But I think to your question, though, it, you can see where the political and social part of this comes into play because not all the time, the most creative designer ends up in those seats. Actually, sometimes they do.  ¶ Jesse: Right.  ¶ Gordon: But you can see where the people and social aspect of the nature of executive jobs coming into play and how those roles get opened, how they hire, how they land, how they evaluate and who ends up in those roles and what they do to staff around those competencies that they may or may not have. ¶ Peter: Did you, I think about this a lot, and I’m wondering if you saw this pattern, like did Chief Design Officers tend to be more creative and so they staffed around themselves operational leadership and business leaders, or did they tend to be better executives? And so they had to staff around themselves, creative leaders and operations people. Like, was there any pattern, or, or is it kind of you know not enough data to discern any, any specific. ¶ Gordon: I don’t have a direct pattern on that, but what I can comment on is I think there’s an increasing pattern around operating models of how they staff those organizations. So when I see the, the kind of line of command within the design organization, what that looks like, and you’re starting to see who’s placed in those, and the, the types of disciplines that they hold. There is some pattern there, like the fact that we’re starting to see design operations as a right hand to the design chief to, to execute the vision. But at the same time, as Peter we talked about, is like, there’s also roles for super senior creative designers to hold a non-people management role. ¶ But I think it really depends, but I think the majority of design executives are not actually staffed as the hyper creative, you know, super creative kind of person. It’s actually more from a, a business angle of what they represent and they work with those creatives to continue to shape the product and design direction. ¶ But I think because given the nature of an executive role and how much it deals with managing upwards, also from a financial and governance standpoint, there isn’t a lot of time to actually exercise that creative muscle from a creative director, but more so from a framework and governance perspective of you infuse the organization with your, your vision of design. ¶ Peter: Were you, so, so you mentioned earlier, as, as, as you’re saying this, I was thinking back on, you know, the folks who have these roles, didn’t go to school for them, to put to put it mildly. And I’m wondering what you saw in terms of how folks developed these skills. Did they just learn on the job? Was it sink or swim? ¶ Did you tend to, did you get a sense that they were, that they got executive MBAs? That they spent their week at Harvard learning what it means to be a, an executive? Did, did they work at companies that were supporting them along the way? Like any, anything that emerged there, just in terms of how these folks figured out what the job was? ¶ Gordon: That’s a great question. I did not see any MBA types. What I did see though, was each one of them being just hyper curious, hyper sharp individuals who are always asking the question of How do I improve? How do I change, how do I evolve? And I think that is such an important lesson that I found with these executives is in that role, that the amount of change you have to go through is so constant and so frequent that you have to think through just how do I continue to grow myself? ¶ Because if your company has gone from a hundred designers to 500 designers, and if you’re remaining in the executive job, your scope and your mindset and your skills are completely different. And there was one thing that really stuck out to me was if you look at when you first start your design career, you’re faced with the challenge of how to think beyond oneself. ¶ And as you go higher and higher into the kind hierarchy, every design executive I talked to they’re like, well, now the challenge is how to not lose oneself. And so you get this flip because you’re so burdened with the weight of the responsibility and the question now, because you’re, you’re a design chief, not an HR chief, is what is your specific point of view and how do you continue to express that to really push the boundaries of what design means at that company? ¶ I think that’s, that’s been an interesting, interesting area of just from a personal standpoint of how you continue to find your voice as an executive at that level of responsibility and, and commitment. ¶ Jesse: Well, it’s interesting too, because I think that a lot of people think of a Chief Design Officer type role as being, you know, it doesn’t get any higher than that. It’s the best. And that, that would be sort of like the culmination of one’s career, right? And I, what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that the people who make it to that place, make it to that place because that’s not the culmination of anything for them, that they are on a path to continue to grow and evolve and advance their own skills. ¶ Gordon: What is true about that is you’re also seeing though a sliver of a trend where designers are assuming also product leadership roles, right? And that’s an interesting move that I started to see was, you know, traditionally, you might see a head of product design from a product management. But now there’s the reverse also with designers becoming more fluent in business, they’re also taking on the product role with design. ¶ So what does that mean from a design standpoint of just the trends and where our careers are going and what skills and expectations are asked of us? I think there’s a really interesting question of just, What does the future of that trio look like as designers become more business savvy and more capable of defending their work and, and, and justifying the investment and what kind of career opportunities that’s going to open for, for, you know, people like us as designers. ¶ Jesse: What do you think the implications of this are for leadership development? As Peter pointed out, you know, they’re all, most of the people who have these leadership roles now were never trained for leadership and some of them were never even trained for design. And so it seems to me that organizations going forward have have a responsibility to figure out how they groom their leaders and how they bring people up through the organization, and then how to help support leaders in developing those skills. What do you think are, are some of the ways that organizations are going to have to address this in order to cultivate leadership talent within their organizations? ¶ Gordon: I think one of the things that’s interesting that we’re starting to see is because we have this large enough wave of design, executive visibility, and also knowledge sharing that’s happening in public, I think there’s now, third-party design executive education that has sprung up and executives are taking these kinds of vehicles to up-level close gaps, as they prepare to become an executive, or if they’re already an executive to take various courses offered by educational institutions. ¶ But I think what the thing here is, is because what’s happening is what we’re seeing is the modernization of design management education that I think has been so behind for some time. And even through my degree, I’ve realized that it is quite behind because some of the content is still rooted in a physical world. ¶ Whereas all of these kinds of business decisions that we’re thinking from a creativity standpoint from a cost standpoint are now occurring in a digital format with different infrastructures and systems to make the best decisions. So I think we’re going to see, at least over this decade is a revolution and design management education. ¶ As the importance of design has increased, as funding for design and investment has increased. And now educators and providers are trying to catch up to, to meet this need. Cause we’re going to see just more design executives. I only talked to 16, but I imagine there’s going to be dozens and dozens more as of Chief Design Officers appearing over the next decade. ¶ Peter: What I was wondering on that note though, is there’s this assumption among digital designers that designed, you know, started when they, in what, with whatever medium they are practicing design. And so for Jesse and I, you know, it started with the web in 1995, that was the beginning of design, or maybe more recent designers started with mobile with the iPhone in 2007, but there is a legacy and a history of design that we could be learning from. ¶ And so while, kind of to, to the point you were saying, while what transpired in the, what, what while design education might feel, design executive education might feel a little backwards looking, right, steeped in brand design management or physical product design management, I’m wondering if there’s stuff that you saw those design leaders, ‘cause I know you spoke with a few and maybe other research you’ve done, that we would be foolish to let go of, right, in our desire to like make it all new and throw out everything that ever happened before, and its all has to be new. What are those qualities that we should maintain a connection with from prior generations of design leadership that you think would be helpful moving forward that maybe we are losing sight of because we’ve gotten so full of ourselves in thinking that all that matters is, is design for kind of a software context?¶ Gordon: Yeah, there’s actually a key word, me and my professors were brainstorming on and we call it “design acuity.” And the way we talk about this is the depth of design understanding. And if you read to a lot of the books in the 1980s, or even before that about design management, I was reading those again. I was like, all of these lessons are still relevant, the way they thought about design and its connection to business is still true. It’s just, there’s a new formats and modalities around the software context that hasn’t been fully bridged yet. It’s so new. That means for the last two decades, really. So when I think about, it’s not so much throwing away, but it’s really like entering this new chapter of where we think about design education and it’s complements to software because at the end of the day, the user experience is still physical and digital at the same time. ¶ So I don’t think we should disregard any of that, but I do think because design education has become so much lighter. Like you have a lot of people in design now with, you know, maybe six months of formal training and a lot of is on the job. So there’s a lot of trial and error. And I think that’s actually going to cause a whole different array of consequences to when you lack the depth of design understanding, but that’s not to say you can’t learn on the job, but it’s just not as perhaps structured or formatted against, you know, a common curriculum that can use as a foundation for how we talk and, and understand design. ¶ Jesse: What have you been inspired to research now? Based on what you discovered here, what questions are you most curious to know the answers to? ¶ Gordon: I think there’s two, one of them, one of the Chief Design Officers asked me is, “Gordon. What is my job?” And how do you do it really well?” I’ll never forget that because it was so simple. And I do think we’re still missing a lot of that knowledge. Especially when we think about operating at this scale. Is what’s what, what is the guidance or playbook around this? ¶ Because there is a lack of knowledge right now. But to another question I pose to design chief was like, where does the brand element come into play here? Because when you’re thinking about design excellence, it’s not just the product, there’s also the brand side of the product. So I think about the, some of the frameworks I learned and also looking back into historical frameworks, the brand side doesn’t go away. There’s the brand side, there’s the customer side. And then the business side and how design uses these factors to reflect and mirror. What are the values of the business and what are the values of the customer and how to construct brands that are enduring and lasting and inspiring and constructing products that deliver those experiences. ¶ So I don’t think that road has been fully crossed by actually many of these design chiefs. They are largely in a product development standard. But I think what’s going to be interesting in the next generation is what does that bridge to cross from a brand development standpoint to bridge product and design and brand to create this unified and cohesive thing. ¶ Peter: Yeah. When you, when you mentioned brand, it’s funny because I think, you know, the practice of user experience design that Jesse and I kind of grew up within and, and have done and written about and thought about, in many ways we were kind of running as fast as we could away from brand practices because brand practices felt inauthentic, right? User experience design reflects user desires and needs, whereas brand always felt imposed. But I think what you’re saying, I, I like, I, I’ve kind of come around to recognize there’s a, there’s a way that brand and the language of brand and the application of brand can be authentic and can connect with these user experience needs and, and could make what we’re doing that much more powerful, so that it doesn’t just feel functional. But there’s, there’s some other quality to it and something you and I have talked about prior, and I’m wondering how it relates to this. And maybe it relates to that question of like the perspective of the Chief Design Officer, right? They almost get lost. ¶ Their point of view gets lost as they’re running these very large organizations, especially if they’re from a user-centered design background, ‘cause they’re taking, they’re taking in so much from others that they don’t know where they exist anymore. And something you’ve mentioned in our prior conversations is this concept of taste, and taste can feel very ephemeral and subjective and lightweight. But I think you and I agree that there’s actually a lot of value there. And I’m wondering as you think about taste, and I know you’ve had some of those conversations with design leaders, like what is, how does taste play a role as a Chief Design Officer or design executive? Like what, how, how should we be thinking about it? How should we, how should design leaders be thinking about developing their sense of taste or sharpening their taste or their discussion of taste? Or how do we, how do we turn this into something that doesn’t feel untethered and feels explicit? Kind of a tool in, in someone’s tool chest? ¶ Gordon: I think one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about this, it’s almost like somewhat philosophical, but I’m sure if you ask certain practitioners of brand, it’s not potentially as subjective as we perceive it to be. When I, you know, when I worked with Tom Hardy who’s a professor at SCAD, he was the corporate design director at IBM in the eighties and nineties, and he showed me this framework of how he evaluates brand attributes in making these types of decisions. I’m like there are common frameworks similar to how we apply somewhat of a rigor and analytical framework to user-centered decisions in making the subjective, not so subjective. And when I think about that, I think about looking at the landscape of software today, and this is where some of the more artistic design chiefs will say, “Oh God, it’s become so commodified, everything looks the same. Everything feels the same.” Is that good? Is that bad? Where is this taking us? If everything is becoming so similar, everywhere and everywhere. And so this, I think this interesting notion of the taste factor is interesting because it’s kind of, what is the percentage of taste implied amongst the system. ¶ And I think about design systems in which how it’s become pervasive in almost every company omplements standardization, but also allows some expression of taste at scale. And so I think about these brands of what they’re trying to construct here is how do you apply and know where to make these special cases of expression at various levels to, to make something original, to make something enduring, to make something memorable to consumers and in society. ¶ And not just as another thing that has come out of an assembly line but something that is, you know, something we really want to treasure as a, both as an artifact and also as something we use every day. So I think there’s an interesting line to straddle here, thinking through both the brand and product exercise. ¶ And I think the ultimate form of design excellence is considering both to bring it to life. And I don’t know if many practitioners have fully crossed this road of both the brand and product side to create this unified vision. ¶ Jesse: Gordon. Thank you so much for being with us. It’s been really great to have you on this. ¶ Gordon: Thank you.¶ Peter: I think this is an excellent,that’s an excellent point to end on. I couldn’t actually ask for a better capper. But before you go, is there anything you want to promote? Anything, that you’re, anything you want to plug or promote? ¶ Gordon: Well, since I’m ending this research and really, I don’t want to end it, but formally it was ended through my graduation. One questions every design executive asked me is, “Hey, what’s next? Like how do we continue to help and push this conversation?” And one of the things I started to noodle on with many of these execs is co-creating, it is what we now call the Design Executive Council. And it’s a body that represents the interests of design executives to advance the state of design. This I believe is the inception of a new group that could really push this conversation through active practitioners and really going through the same questions that we asked on this podcast and having the space to do so and contribute to various missions that would push the boundaries on things like, can we finally define the job definition of the Chief Design Officer the playbook of how to do it how to negotiate board rules for design officers. ¶ And so there’s a whole area of opportunity, I think for the CDO area that is just starting to unfold. And actually Peter, you’ve done so much great work in laying the bricks here. But I think potentially this group could be a really exciting place to, to drive more missions around this space and do it in a program. ¶ Peter: Excellent. Two more things. First. I’m curious. So you did this research, I’m curious, separate from the conversations. It sounds like you did some like book learning in, you know, old books, magazines, et cetera. Was there any single resource that you uncovered in your research that is not, well-known, not, not, not appreciated that you would want to make sure, like, if you were all to just read one book or one magazine article for those who are listening to the recording….he’s actually gone off to get whatever this one resource is. ¶ Jesse: He just walked away. He’s bringing something back. Maybe he’s just…¶ Peter: Yeah…  ¶ Gordon: Um, right here. ¶ Peter: Design Management by Brigitte, I can’t see the bottom, Borja de Mozota. Well, we’ll put that in show notes. ¶ Gordon: So this was really one of the first books, if not the first book on design management that considers the full scope of both the brand side and how this connects to corporate innovation. And if you read through this, all the evidence we needed for justifying design, investment and business, I’m like she’s done the homework. ¶ Uh, There were academic studies done many years ago before I was even probably born on showing the evidence. But what I think hasn’t happened is like this evidence somehow wasn’t surfaced to the world and we’re in the software world, still jostling with a lot of like question marks. So I’ve gone through this book a couple of times, and it’s continually been a really important textbook for just the fundamentals of design value and corporations. ¶ Peter: Interesting. And I’m, I did a quick Googling and it’s available as an ebook for less than 20 bucks. So it’s, I’ve found that oftentimes these academic textbooks end up costing like $180 or something, but this one is affordable. So thank you for that. We will make sure that that gets reflected. Last thing. ¶ Where can people find you out on the internets? ¶ Gordon: On Twitter, they can find me at gordoncching or you can just find me directly on my website, gordon-ching.com. ¶ Peter: Excellent.  ¶ Jesse: Fantastic, Gordon, thank you again. This has been great. ¶ Gordon: Thank you so much. And design executives were starting this council, so hit me up.  ¶ Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @jjg. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessjamesgarrett.com. ¶ You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design, where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find. ¶ As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.

Transcript Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Together:  And we’re finding our way Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: Here we are at episode 25. We have had a whole bunch of interesting conversations that were just the two of us. We have had a whole bunch of interesting conversations that involved some other folks as well. We’ve definitely been chasing some threads. We have been following some emergent themes. And we’ve each had different things, I think, that have come out of these conversations that have resonated with us. And so, I thought it would be a great way to wrap up the year here on episode 25 with a little bit of reflection and kind of riffing a bit on those emergent themes, and those big, outstanding questions that we still have about all of this stuff—the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. Peter: I’ve heard about those. I did my homework, and I came up with, like, probably 25 new truisms that I think I’ve got, well, I was just writing shit as it occurred to me. I basically went back over every episode, going back to episode one, and try to plug new truisms, that weren’t the same as the ones that I already had in my design leadership truisms thing. And then I did some filtering and prioritization and I’ve got, oh, eight to 10 that actually bubbled up. Jesse: Hm. Wow. Well, you approach this task with a great deal more rigor than I did. I have… Peter: You were always that kid who skated by in class, didn’t you? You’re like, “I’m smart. I don’t need to try that hard.” Jesse: I’ll just wing it in the moment. Yes. Peter: Did you also have heavy metal T-shirts? ‘Cause the kid in my school who did that was a total metalhead. Jesse: I had the punk rock t-shirt. It’s not the heavy metal t-shirts but yes, yes, I was that kid. Well, why don’t you kick us off with something that has bubbled to the top for you? Peter: For me, I think if we have one piece of settled law, when it comes to the conversations we are having, it is that “Leadership is relationship.”  Jesse: Yeah. Peter: So often, I think leadership is thought of as vision. Leadership is thought of as something galvanizing or high and mighty. And when we were exploring these concepts one-on-one earlier, and then as we’ve involved others in the conversations these last few months, it just keeps coming back for me that the medium in which leadership exists is relationships.  Yeah. That was new for me. I gave talks and workshops on leadership and never talked about relationships. I talked about elements of relationships, communication, or managing down, managing across, managing up, diplomacy. But I never actually used the word relationship, I don’t think. Or if I did, I didn’t bubble it up to the top in a way that I would going forward, to focus on, in order to lead, you need to manage your relationships. Jesse: Yeah. I actually just realized that I have the notebook here where I first wrote that phrase down. I was doing a brainstorm just trying to figure out, “What’s my territory? What’s my sweet spot? What do I really care about? What are the areas of challenge that I see myself focusing on?” and, man, this has gotta be at least two years old, maybe two and a half years. Peter: Oh, no shit. Jesse: Yeah, this is where it started. I did this brainstorm of the big topics that were floating around in my brain. And then I did some IA to those and that kind of boiled down to this big idea. So, yeah, yeah, totally, totally agree with that one. And I think some interesting things have come out of that, that when I first wrote this down, I didn’t really appreciate at the time, that I’ve discovered through our conversation. Part of it having to do with trust, and trust being the foundation of those relationships, and the craft of leadership being in some ways, the craft of creating trusting relationships and being trustworthy and fostering and facilitating trustworthiness in your environment. Peter: Yeah. 100%, we talked a lot about trust. It’s funny that you talk about that as a craft. ‘Cause one of my new truisms, related to a couple of things you just said, is, I wrote, “The crafts of (design) leadership are communication and information architecture.” Jesse: Hm. Interesting. Peter: And I, I did… Jesse: I agree with that. I mean, yes. Peter: Obviously, communication, you can’t relate without communicating and communicating here means all kinds of things, including as a means towards building those trusting relationships. The information architecture piece though came about… It’s funny though, ‘cause you said you applied IA to your thinking. One of the words that I’m thinking about, it was spurred by some work I did with a client recently, is the word “enduring,” that which lasts, that which stands the test of time. And I think information architecture supports leadership that endures, and I use information architecture because I think, and maybe it’s been exacerbated by operating distributed and remotely through a pandemic, if leadership is about communication, leadership is then about information, and you need to be able to manage and structure and capture and make accessible that information that is your leadership. And you need to think about it intentionally. And that’s I think what led me to that architectural frame. Jesse: I think also leaders are, of necessity, orchestrators of systems, and systems instantiate knowledge as information architecture within them. So, the IA that gets embedded and coded, baked into your systems, becomes the way that the organization understands the world. And so, it is on the leader to imbue, infuse, enrich that IA with as complex and nuanced and understanding as they possibly can. On that systems note, this brings me to something tangentially related which is the note that I’ve written down here as organizations eat design for lunch. And what I mean by that is that there is this constant pressure to take the wild messiness of the creative process, and standardize, componentize, compartmentalize that process into that which is predictable and repeatable. And this is going to be the natural tendency of all organizations. And it’s like gravity that design leaders are going to continue to have to pull against because that is what organizations do. They take these complex functions and digest them, break them down into… Peter: Metabolize them… Jesse: Yeah, there you go. Metabolize them. Absolutely. And, in order to preserve that wild spark of the creative process, the design leader has to find ways to prevent it from being digested and to prevent it from being standardized, componentized, rationalized. Peter: So, number one was Leadership is relationship. Number two is, Your job is to help people cope with uncertainty. Jesse: Very true. Very true. Peter: And I was addressing exactly what you’re talking about in order for design to succeed. You have to play in an uncertain space for a while, and that makes other people very uncomfortable. And so, a design leader needs to have ways of helping others live with that uncertainty, manage that uncertainty, be okay with that uncertainty, thrive in that uncertainty, whatever it is, because that’s the reality. Jesse: …And to resist definitions of design that drive out uncertainty. To have design turned into a function that becomes all about certainty, it diminishes the value you get from design, because you aren’t doing that experimentation out at the edges. And it’s interesting, too, because you know, we’ve talked about the path of the individual leader and the way that when you are an individual contributor at a senior level, your credibility often is tied to your expertise and your depth of knowledge. And then you move into a leadership position, and the role is often asking you to weigh in in places where not only do you not have the expertise, no one has the expertise. And in fact, it’s on you to manage the dynamic that comes out of that. And it can lead to this undermining of confidence because we don’t know where our own credibility comes from as leaders anymore, if we have previously completely attached that to craft and haven’t attached it to the relationship building, the trust building and so forth. Peter: Yeah, there was one that is related to what you were just saying. It is, “Design leaders should not lead as others do.” Figuring out your leadership style is important. And that’s true for any leader, not just design leaders, but I think there could be an unfortunate tendency for design leaders to see, as models, other leaders Who lead toward certainty, and that would be harmful for design. So, we need to chart our own leadership path that embraces that which makes design interesting. And there aren’t really many, if any, models of how to do that successfully, Jesse: Yeah. Yes. And I think it’s on the design leader to be aware of the culture that they’re situated in, and its willingness to embrace or support multiple models of leadership. Because I think often design leaders get forced into, they get pushed into… this shape, according to what’s made leaders successful in other functions in the organization that are nothing like design, that have nothing to do with design, but have established the template for leadership in the organization as a whole. And so, this is part of what I mean about having to fight against those expectations of the organization as a whole. And I hate to frame it as a fight. There’s so much I noticed reflecting on the season, there’s so much, us versus them Peter: Yeah, there’s an antagonism. Jesse: Yeah. You know, the best stories that we’ve heard from folks in these conversations have been the stories of partnership. It hasn’t been about how I slapped down the head of engineering and put them in their place, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Doesn’t get you there. Peter: Well, one of the ones related to this is, Success requires shared ownership. And I think that came out in our recent conversation with Jen. It’s actually come out in some work that I’m doing. But to what you’re saying, and this is, I think, one of the hopefully temporary challenges of design leadership, is these two modes of needing to fight, to protect the space for the uncertainty of design in order for it to operate as impactfully as it can; while recognizing that ultimately in order to succeed, it’s not about a fight to protect, it’s about a way to partner and share and collaborate. And we’re caught between these two modes and I think design leaders find themselves vacillating in between them. And I think that’s a particular struggle. I think more mature functions, particularly when you think about senior leadership, they become less and less about the function and they become more and more about a joint understanding of success. But design has trouble committing to that joint understanding of success because there’s still work to be done to clarify the opportunity, and the role, and the potential impact design can have. And if you get too shared too soon, you blunt that. Design feels like it starts to accommodate to a dominant mode. Jesse: Yeah. I think that’s true. and so much of this, it feels like comes back to. How do I, as a design leader, get permission to take some more chances and not be adhering to a script that was written for me by somebody else? But how do I get the space to explore around those edges and try some stuff that might not work? Peter: Yeah, I think something that I’m not good at, and I suspect other design leaders have trouble with, is playing a long game. We want to make the kind of change we desire immediately once given some authority to do so. And then I think often get rejected as being incompatible. When I was doing the work supporting Kaiser Permanente, the guy I was working with, who’d been there 30 years, had this model for, How do you get permission, essentially? And in that organization, it didn’t matter what you did before you joined Kaiser Permanente. You could have run a big design team, even at another healthcare company, but it wasn’t Kaiser Permanente. And so when you joined Kaiser Permanente, the first thing you needed to do was demonstrate competence with what was expected of you. Only after you demonstrated competence, then that allowed you to build relationships. There’s that word. Build relationships to develop the social capital. And only once you had that, could you then exhibit initiative, right? And the issue that this guy saw was that people would try to get to initiative out of the gate, ‘cause they’re like, “What, I was super successful in these other contexts. I know what I’m doing. Things are not working as they should here. I want to do things in a new way for Kaiser, thus, I want to take initiative,” and those folks would inevitably get slapped back, slapped back, slapped back, and the people who succeeded were those who spent a couple years chopping wood and carrying water within the context, but not going native, not just becoming part of the machine. always maintaining that understanding of the long view, but realizing you have to build toward it. Jesse: Yeah. So it sounds like even with the politics, you want to engage with them intentionally with your own ends in mind, and not allow the politics to take over what drives all of your choices, but to maintain a certain healthy distance from it as you’re playing that long game. Music break 1 Jesse: Thematically, I feel like this quest for credibility is a recurring theme that I’ve heard in conversation with a lot of design leaders and it manifests in a lot of different ways. Often I feel once you find your way into that leadership position, your credibility is your currency among your peers. That credibility is what allows your peers to either align with you around the next crazy thing that you want to do, or at least to be able to say, “I don’t understand this, but you seem to, so I’m gonna step back and be hands off.” If you don’t have that credibility, then you aren’t able to get that broad web of support among that peer group. That web of personal trust among a group of empowered peers allows for the flexibility and permission to break all of the rules. Any kind of systemic intervention can be overridden by the choices made by that group of trusting empowered peers. They decide the rules of the game. They can do whatever they want. Peter: Right, another item that bubbled up, was “Even leaders need cover.” So yes, you need credibility. That credibility can often be enabled or enhanced, or even just simply established, by your leader. And that relationship that you have with your leader and, Jesse: Well, leaders have the ability to bestow or convey credibility upon the leaders underneath them in the organization. Peter: And I think a challenge for these heads of design is they often don’t get the cover from their leader, because their leader doesn’t understand what they do. Their leader often feels obligated to bring on someone in that role, but doesn’t necessarily appreciate what that role takes. And so that design leader then isn’t awarded organizational credibility from their leader to then behave as they see fit. And that creates this constraint for this design leader’s ability to make the kind of change they want, because their peers are, like, “Your boss doesn’t quite know what to do with you. So why should we’d expect to know what to do with you?” Jesse: Yeah. This goes back to a lot of what we talked about in the charter two-parter. For design leaders who haven’t done that charter work, they don’t know what their message is, they don’t know what their story is. They don’t know what their value proposition is. And so, they’re not in a position to set their leaders up to be effective evangelists for them, effective salespeople for them, effective partners for them. If you consider the value of design to be totally apparent on its surface, then you’re going to have challenges as a leader because you are going to need to be able to articulate that at a deeper level than you have before. Peter: Yes. this kind of relates to something else I wrote. “Design’s true superpower is to make the intangible tangible.” Jesse: Hmm. Peter: This is one that I came to perhaps thinking a bit about our conversation with Erica and how “the business model is the new grid.” A lot of times the challenge with models, business models, et cetera, is they are intangible, and there’s a role that design plays in putting shape to that which others are advocating, to help everybody understand the implications. That ability to provide some something concrete to that which can otherwise feel very abstract, just brings so much clarity into an organization. And I don’t think we as designers and design leaders embrace that nearly enough. We seem to think our superpower is in our craft of delivery. That is a power, but I think our superpower is that ability to take something fuzzy and uncertain and vague and nebulous and give it shape so that it can then be discussed. Jesse: Yeah. I like this because it ties together what I’ve seen as this growing divergence in design practice across these different problem domains. As we’ve talked about, the way design is practiced in house is starting to look pretty different from how design is practiced in agencies. And the way that design is practiced when you are working on a product that is central to the revenue engine of an organization is a very different story from what design looks like when you’re working on value-adds or ancillary functions of the organization. And I do see that what they all have in common is this process of making the intangible tangible. But I think that the untapped value of design that we hear a lot of folks yearning to see realized is that process of making the intangible, tangible as a mode of inquiry, as a way of eliciting answers to deeper questions rather than shallower ones. Peter: Hm. Jesse: And in what I have thought of as the production UX world, where UX roles are really reduced to prototypers, Figma jockeys, the nature of the questions that are getting answered through that design work are pretty shallow. And meanwhile, you’ve got the agencies which are potentially doing concept development work, or other kinds of ideation work where they’re asking much deeper questions. But not a lot of organizations are synthesizing those. Not a lot of organizations are creating a holistic sense of design. Everybody is looking at design in terms of these narrow slices of value that it can deliver. Peter:  There’s this missing layer of strategic design as a practice that I think was emerging 15, 10 years ago through practices such as ours and IDEO’s and Frog’s and other companies. Much of design was happening within agencies and consulting companies. And then as design shifted in house, that strategic engagement has fallen off in favor of production because that’s the obvious value. And there’s what we talked about with Jorge. There’s green shoots of recognition that this has been missing, but it’s, you know, it’s green shoots in a desert. There needs to be a concerted effort to try to reinvigorate, go back to what Erica talked about, that critical role that design can play in thinking about futures and opportunities. Jesse: Yeah. Well, if I think about the original dream of UX, the dream was that these practices would enable product strategy, product definition, product decisions to be made with experiential outcomes as the primary criteria for whether or not something shipped. And the idea implicit in that, being that value would naturally flow from optimizing for experiential outcomes, that has not really happened. The designers have been sort of sent back to their desks to make more screens. A few of the business consulting types have picked up some design language and maybe a little bit of design philosophy and stirred it into their practices to make their clients feel more creative somehow, yeah. And the promise hasn’t been realized. And there are a lot of the UX old school folks like ourselves who feel like something has been lost along the way, okay, and are getting pretty discouraged about what it’s going to take to recapture that or to fulfill that promise. But my question is, Was that promise one worth investing in, in the first place? Like was the dream of UX, really just a dream? Peter: My short answer is no. My slightly longer answer is, if we look back on the state of user experiences in 2001, when we started Adaptive Path, and we look at the state of user experiences, essentially 20 years later, I would say that on the whole things have improved, primarily with digital user experiences Much has been done to allay the confusion and consternation and various obstacles that people faced trying to use tools to do things in their lives. And I think, on the whole, things are better. What I think we didn’t appreciate was a little bit of the, “then what?” part of that. Okay. Now you’ve made it easier to do your banking or pay bills or buy shit. I think one of the things, as we’re getting towards the end of what for many people is quite possibly the single most difficult year, probably in my lifetime, is a feeling like, “Then what, what next, to what end?” Okay. So we’ve raised the floor for user experiences to enable more and more people to manage basic functions in their lives, but it feels like we did that with the sense, that as you said, simply by doing that, that was value in and of itself. Jesse: Well, definitely experience design work needs to be a lot more contextual than it was 20 years ago. It needs to be more contextual than it is now, in taking into account the second order, third order effects of our design choices, the systemic effects of our design choices, looking beyond the individual user experience to the impact that has on experiences of families, communities, societies. Additionally, a huge piece of the context that’s been missing, you know, thinking about that dream of UX as I described it, that was actually a dream of organizational change, a dream of changing the way that organizations make decisions to put humans at the center and to put human experience and human experiential outcomes at the center. And that organizational change is a deeper challenge to realize than simply getting better at turning metrics into design choices, into shipped product. Peter: Jared Spool still has that dream. I was listening in on a talk he was giving yesterday, about agile practices and user experience. And, basically, what he was arguing for is, if you do not have literally the entire team operating as a UX team, and that includes product management and engineering and data folks, you will always be less effective in delivering on quality user experiences. And as he was saying this, I’m like, “Oh my God, it just feels like a fairy tale. how am I going to get all these engineers, all these data scientists, all these other folks operating in a design way?” You take what are considered many of the most design forward organizations, they don’t begin to do that. Jesse: Well, I think that one thing that happened is that as design was removed from strategy and shunted toward production, it was also severed from research. And that partnership between research and design, I think, was such a powerful driver, especially those predesign insights. The research function, as related to design, that these production-oriented organizations have held on to have been quantitative analytics, metrics-oriented research, or evaluative post-design research. But that deeper research that asks the questions that can really inform strategy from a design perspective is lost. So you see, in organizations like Jen’s organization where they have, we have, a robust research function with its own mandate. They are driving a lot of that kind of questioning that a design group could be driving, but in most cases isn’t because they don’t have the connection to that research capability. If you want to see that mode of inquiry come into play, there isn’t anybody else that you can really rely on who’s going to bring that. Peter: Well, right. I think the role that design plays in that regard is going back to making the intangible tangible. These research insights are going to be intangible, they are going to be ideas. They’re going to be notions rooted in something tangible. There’s nothing more tangible than good thick data from ethnographic research. But then you abstract that to realize insights, opportunities. And then to bring that back into the tangible, a role that design plays. And I think the point you’re making, so much of design within organizations though, wouldn’t know how to handle making research insights tangible. There’s just too much distance between that kind of insight and the practice of UI design. and we’ve lost comfort with more conceptual forms of design internally, at least, because they’re not shipping. Design is valued to the degree to which it ships. Jesse: Again, I think it comes back to the credibility of the leader. If you’ve got leader with high credibility, high trust among their peers, cross-functionally they can get the permission to do different things. I think that it is challenging for designers to have the credibility, to step into those strategic conversations, if they don’t have strong pre-design qualitative research function to support them in that work. It’s okay to just verbally agree with me. No, you refuse to do it verbally. You’re just going to nod at me. Yes. I agree with you. Yeah, that’s fine. You’re allowed to agree. Music break 2 Peter: You had said something earlier that was a little bit around the dream of UX, around the frustrations that maybe old school UXers are having, as that dream seems to be evaporating. There’s also, you introduced me to some of the thinking of younger designers and their frustration of having been sold what feels like a bill of goods, in terms of the potential of that dream of UX, and then they go in-house and they’re just turning your crank There was a, I think it was a TikTok video that had gotten, pushed to Twitter… Jesse: Oh, I saw it.. Peter: Of a young designer screaming about, Why did she think that UX design was going to allow her… Jesse: …to fulfill her life’s purpose. Yeah. Peter: Yeah, like “What the hell was wrong with me?” is kind of how she was phrasing it. Which, as I’m watching that, as someone who’s been doing this for 25 years, it just broke my heart. Because I want UX design to feel like a purpose-driven practice. Jesse: Well, because it is, and has been for so many people, but again, these other folks they are not having that experience. Peter: Well, and that connects to the conversation with Vivianne, and probably my single biggest takeaway from that discussion, We do not take things seriously enough. We are not taking seriously the impact that our work has. We are not taking seriously enough our ethical responsibility to our users and customers, whether it’s indirectly through the product of our work, or directly when we engage them in user research conversations and those types of things. That was something Vivianne made very clear that I just had never really sat with. And also what Vivianne made clear is, we’re not taking ourselves seriously. The effect that our work is having on who we are, and how we’re behaving in how we’re operating. Thus, it leads to things like this video of a young designer screaming, ‘cause that is like the only way that they can kind of handle the cognitive dissonance that they are operating within. It’s just, this… what is it? The barbaric yawp, right? Like it’s just, What the fuck?! The word reckoning has been used a lot in the last couple of weeks, and there’s some type of conversation to be had, coming to grips with our role, our practice, our context, our impact that we’ve just continued to kick that can down the road, just, like, make that somebody else’s problem. Thinking about conversations around certification, conversations around professionalism, how do we establish a practice of what we’re doing, such that we can institutionalize some of these issues, so that not everyone is approaching them uniquely and individually, but there’s a collective understanding and response that people can lean on, can scaffold them, can support them with these different tensions Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Peter: And it’s weird for me, cause I’m someone who tries very hard not to take myself seriously. Because you know, the world doesn’t need more of that. Jesse: Yeah. Well, I think it’s a question of genuinely owning the responsibility that we have. The responsibility that we have for the experiences of our users, the responsibility that we have for the folks on our teams. You know, one of the most important things that has come to the fore for me, has been that leaders cannot simply turn their backs on the trauma that is rippling through their organizations. You can’t just look the other way and hope that that stuff all resolves itself. You have to take ownership, you have to take responsibility for the emotional experiences of the people on your teams. And that responsibility is one that people in all functions of business have been avoiding for way too long. Peter: You mean forever? Like literally forever. It was interesting to hear Vivianne talk about the counseling background, I forget what she called, the human services work, essentially social work… Jesse: Yeah. Peter: …not corporatist. And has a whole legacy and a foundation and a context of values and practices that have emerged to support the people working in that field. But it’s clear, as I think you just articulated, all of us would benefit from engaging with that understanding, regardless of the work we’re doing. And there’s this, it’s not quite sociopathy. I’m trying to think of the right word for it, but there’s this thing that happens when we engage in more business contexts, where we’re just supposed to remove that part of ourselves. Jesse: The machine is trying to dehumanize you as a leader. It needs to. And so all of the cultural pressure that you’re going to get is going to be to cut those pieces of your brain out and to bury it and not think about it. And that’s why it’s extra important for the leader, personally, to keep those things alive for themselves in how they interact with those around them and how they conduct themselves, in how they orchestrate the systems that they’re responsible for creating, because those systems can become mechanisms of harm on an ongoing basis. As you were talking about those systems are how leaders leave lasting legacies. Peter: I like the alliteration. That’s good. That’s good. How do design leaders pursue an authentic rehumanization in their role, without it becoming the focus of their efforts. ‘Cause there’s still a job to do. The work to be done feels daunting to me. When I start going down this path, it feels like you almost have to stop everything else for a while. This is where the reckoning concept comes from. Like, literally have to stop everything else for a while, and come to grips with all this shit, make that space to deal with it. And then once we’ve developed some new understanding, only then can we start to reengage with our work practices from this position of heightened awareness. Jesse: Yeah, but you’re never going to get that. You’re never going to get that break. So, so then it’s a question of, How do you weave these things into your existing practices day by day, and start making incremental improvement, because you’re not going to get a chance to rethink the whole system. And even if you did, very few design leaders have the backing of their senior leadership to the extent that they can change all of the systems around them as well, because whatever systems you create as a design leader, you have to be able to interface with the culture that you’re situated in. Peter: Right. What were your questions? You said you had some questions. Jesse:  I did have that question about the lost dream of UX. it sounds like it still exists in pockets, but as a larger cultural force within the industry, it’s been lost. Moreover, for UX doesn’t seem to have a cultural center, so to speak in the way that it did when there were really, there were three conferences that you could go to. And the community does not have that level of focus anymore, the work does not have that level of focus anymore. And the dispersion of UX across these different contexts and therefore different models, I wonder at what point speciation occurs. And you’re now talking about an evolutionary path that’s so divergent that you’re really talking about an entirely different job, a different role. I think we’re getting closer to that all the time. Peter: Well, what did you say? Speciation? Which I think is probably in this case, specialization. Jesse: I’m not sure that’s true. I mean, I’m not sure that I would frame it that way, unless you consider startups a specialty, because startups have their own way of doing UX, which looks nothing like the way that agencies do it, which looks nothing like the way that large established organizations do it. And again, the way that you do it, when you’re working on something that is really core and central to the business, is going to look very different from somebody who is working on some kind of support system around the edges. Peter: Or someone who is explicitly been tasked with charting new territory. Jesse: Yeah. If you’re fortunate to have folks who have that mandate. Jesse: So, in short, we’re under-prepared, under-skilled, under-resourced, blind spots all over the place. Got more enemies than allies. The challenge in front of us is daunting in its scale. What could go wrong? Peter: The funny thing about all of that? Is, “And it’s never been better.” Jesse: I couldn’t agree more. Peter: I think that’s where we, I don’t think we can uh, end any better than that. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: Thank you, Jesse. Thank you for a year of eye-opening mind-bending thought-provoking conversations. Jesse: Thank you. It has been a really edifying and satisfying journey for me as well. And I look forward to more in 2021, as we continue Finding our way.  Peter: So, yeah. So, this’ll be the last episode for this season Jesse: All kinds of new things in 2021 for all of us. Peter: Exactly. So keep watching the skies. In the meantime you can find us on Twitter. I’m @Peterme. He’s @JJG. And even though we won’t be posting new episodes for a while, you can always reach out to us through our website at https://findingourway.design/ Use the contact form there. We read everything that comes through. And something we haven’t asked for that I’m going to ask for, is for you to rate us on various podcasting platforms. I think that would be helpful for us. If you like the show please give us a rating, whether it’s Apple or Spotify or whatever these services are. Jesse: Seven out of five stars. Peter: All the stars, whatever, whatever the stars is, all of them. Help people find us help us stand out amidst what is a just immense ocean of material out there. And even during this break, we would love to hear from you. So don’t hesitate to reach out. Jesse: All right. Thanks Peter. This has been great. Peter: Thank you, Jesse.

Transcript Jorge:  If you only think of your work as trying to make whatever you’re working on more engaging, or more usable, or more user friendly first and foremost, you are likely not taking in enough of the picture to do something that is going to be ultimately good for the world. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, And we’re Finding Our Way Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show, author of the book Living in Information, host of the podcast The Informed Life, UX consultant, and educator, Jorge Arango joins us for a freewheeling conversation covering topics such as how his work is informed by his background in architecture, balancing craft and intellectual inquiry in design education, professional certification for designers once again, and a whole lot more. Peter: I’ve been intrigued seeing my children embrace Chromebook because of school, and it’s funny when I sit down to use it, and I have to learn how it works, and they have no trouble with going from keyboard to screen and back and forth and all that. It’s trivial But also, they have no idea how the computer works. They don’t know where files are stored or anything like that. And it doesn’t matter. It just works. They tap things, things show up, they type things. And that’s what this next generation is growing up within. So it’ll be interesting to see what carries forward from that context. Jorge: A lot of it has to do with the mental models that you bring to the technology. And if you don’t have a mental model already established, you are learning these things for the first time. This idea of computing in the cloud, when you say Chromebook, well, you’re doing computing without local file support. Like, everything that you’re doing there is hosted in the cloud, right? Like that’s the whole point of those things. You’re taking so much for granted as to what user’s mental models are when they’re trying to use the thing, and it’s not until you actually sit down with people and see them interacting with the thing that you’ve designed, that you discover, “No, wait,” you as a designer have a much more elaborate understanding of the underpinnings of this thing. And it’s very hard for you to break free of that understanding and to put yourself in the shoes of whoever’s going to be using this thing. So I feel fortunate to have had that experience early on, because it taught me to not take for granted the fact that everyone would understand the basic workings of these things. And I think we’ve seen as digital experiences become a bigger part of our lives, more and more people are going to be doing more and more basic things there. And we can’t assume that they are savvy or that they have the entirety of the mental model that we bring to it as designers, or as people who are passionate about technology or what have you. Jesse: I’ve heard from a number of people, stories of that light-bulb, “aha!” moment of realizing that users have different mental models than those of us who are closer to the work of creating these technology products. And that’s often the moment where people get the user-centered religion, and they start getting really interested in research methods and things like that. Was that your experience? Jorge: I think it took me longer than others. My background is in architecture… Peter: So, you know better already. [laughing] Jorge: Yeah, absolutely. [laughing] I remember seeing, I think it’s the third matrix movie where they have the architect, or is it the second…? Peter: I didn’t–I’ve only seen the first. Jorge: It’s been a long time, but I remember the architect dressed in his white three-piece suit, right, and knowing everything, and that type of mindset is one of the risks, I think, of an architectural education, in that you study the history of architecture and a lot of it focuses on the architects and what they’ve done, right? And so much of architecture has been done by people who are setting up these structures. Obviously, they don’t do it alone. Only the smallest buildings can be done by a single individual or a small group. The bigger ones are large group efforts and much like moviemaking, there has to be someone to bring coherence to the effort, and I think an architectural education emphasizes the role of director of the architect, the person who is there to bring coherence to the effort. And I think that it can do so at the expense of understanding the contextual conditions, the needs of the users. That was my experience. I went to university and found myself just worshiping the work of folks like Le Corbusier and Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, and these people who I saw as bringing coherence and order. A beautiful order. And in the case of someone like Mies van der Rohe, this very minimalistic and elegant order to environments, free of the intrusions of, you know, human usage. You see photos of some of those works, I’m thinking of, like, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, I don’t know if I’ve seen photos with people in that thing. And I don’t think that people in the building would make it better. I think that it’s a… I think it’s a beautiful object, right? It’s like a beautiful artifact. And I have not visited it. But I have had the opportunity to visit a few of Le Corbusier’s buildings. And in some ways those are more beautiful in the abstract than they are in reality. If you visit some Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, I remember Fallingwater, it’s a very beautiful environment, but it’s one where I felt like the creation process had closed. And, I was not invited, as a user of that place, to, in any way, make it my own or expand it or make it better. It was an expression of an idea taken to its most interesting limits that doesn’t necessarily make it a good place to live in, I don’t think. Peter: Something like Fallingwater, those are primarily residences. So with Frank Lloyd Wright, he would be commissioned to build something for someone. So it doesn’t matter whether or not we like it as long as the clients liked it. That was the closed loop. So you have residential architecture where you know who the people are who are using it, but then you go another concentric circle out and you have architecture, maybe public buildings, Barcelona Pavilion that you were explaining, those types of things. If at all, how are architects taught to distinguish between residential, commercial, industrial? Are there different approaches given these different contexts? Then to bring it closer to what we’re working in, you teach at a design school, and I don’t know if you heard the episode with Erika where she railed against the limitations of design education being around formalist structures, like the grid. All we’re preparing our designers to do is to apply the grid when in fact the real design problems are elsewhere. And so how well are we teaching, training people to practice in different contexts, different audiences. Jorge: There are several directions we can take this. One has to do with the function of the building, or the function of whatever you’re designing. And you called out the differences between residential and commercial and other uses, and I don’t want to be unfair to my architectural education. I was saying that it was my own failing to gravitate towards these photogenic works and this hero worship of the architect. But a lot of the architectural education that I got had to do with process, with the approach to designing. I got exposed to a lot of different approaches to doing that, including things like contextual research and, for example, understanding the environmental conditions surrounding the project, which for a building… Buildings exist in a physical environment and you have to understand how the sun arcs over the sky, for example, and how that changes during different seasons, depending on where on the earth you are building. How you will access the building from the street, what views are accessible. And there are assembly and manufacturing factors that you have to take into consideration. You have to understand the physical properties of materials. You have to understand the structural needs that will allow the artifact to withstand the forces of gravity, for example, or there are ergonomic factors that have to do with how people use environments. Like you have to make doors a certain width if people are to fit through them. And you get to learn all of those things. And those things are universal whether you’re doing residential building versus a commercial building or a civic or whatever other thing. The part that is specific to each use is what in architecture is called The Program, which has to do with understanding the functions that the building must serve. There’s also a history to doing that type of building. So, people have been designing structures that will serve as their homes for a long time and whatever you do, whatever intervention you make, has to somehow address that. So there are things that you can generalize and things that are specific, and you do get to learn about those differences in architecture school. Now there was another question in there, Peter, about whether that translates to what we’re doing in education. And you talked about my teaching. I teach at the interaction design program at California College of the Arts. So, it’s very much focused on interaction design, and CCA also has an architecture school and it has other departments, but I’m in the interaction design department. And, I would say that we try to give students a holistic understanding of the design process. I have not heard the episode with Erika, but I think I can empathize with what she’s talking about, in that I think that a lot of what passes for design education these days, has to do with the more superficial aspects of design, maybe things like using particular tools or things that have to do with the manifestation of design work, like the craft of design, which is hugely important. I think that you have to develop mastery of craft, but there’s this other aspect to education, which has to do with teaching people to see the world in a particular way and see problems in a particular way. And I don’t see design as a way for us to make things more engaging or more usable or more user friendly. First and foremost, I see design as a way of knowing the world and knowing the problems that we’re dealing with. And it’s a way of knowing that involves making things, putting them into the world and seeing how they function. So it’s in some ways, very empirical, which is different from other ways of knowing the world. In my own teaching. what I would like my students to get from my classes is an understanding that often in design work, there’s no right way to do things. There’s no right or wrong. There’s no true or false. There are some things that are better than others, and never are the problems you’re dealing with isolated. They’re always part of something bigger. And you are dealing with systems. You are dealing with complex environments. And if you only think of your work as trying to make whatever you’re working on more engaging, or more usable, or more user friendly, first and foremost, you are likely not taking in enough of the picture to do something that is going to be ultimately good for the world. I’ll just say it like that. It’s not going to be good for your company. It’s not going to be good for the world. It’s not going to be good for you. It’s a very narrow vision of what design work is. Jesse: It sounds like what you’re advocating for is a way of thinking about design that looks beyond design merely as a tool for the realization of an idea, and frames design more as a mode of inquiry, a way of understanding problems, a way of understanding the world. Peter: I’m wondering though how well that’s received in an academic context where students are paying $80,000, a hundred thousand dollars, and expect to get a job. How do you balance skills-building and learning process, with this more intellectual pursuit of inquiry and framing. Jorge: The two cannot be separated because, like I said, what makes design unique as a way of knowing is that it is a way of knowing that that makes things and tests them in the world. I always like to say that the purpose of design is to make the possible tangible, and the making-things-tangible part is very important. So, craft is hugely important. And this semester, I’m co-teaching two classes. And one of the classes has the students making prototypes and these prototypes are meant to be convincing. They’re prototypes of mobile apps. And one of the ways of evaluating whether they’ve done a good job or not, is whether this prototype that they’ve wired up using something like Framer or Sketch or XD convinces someone that they’re looking at an app. And there’s a lot of craft that goes into that. That’s not easy. It’s something that takes practice. So, the analogy that I use with students is that we are there as something like a strength trainer. You hire a strength trainer to show you good form when doing exercises, and the best trainers are the ones who will know how to do the exercises themselves, who’ve been doing it for a long time, who themselves manifest the practices that they are teaching you. If you work with a strength trainer and you’re doing, for example, something like a bench press or a squat, they will come to you and they will say, “Look, you don’t have your back right, right? Like when you’re doing squats, you’re going to hurt yourself. So try doing this,” and you emulate, and then you observe them as they do the work and you give them critique. So, it’s a fine balance between the craft and the more theoretical part of this stuff. A challenge that we face in design work is that the craft part of it is so cool. And it’s so engaging. When you make a prototype with something like Figma and it’s convincing, and it looks like the thing, you feel such a rush of energy. It’s like, “Wow, this thing is amazing. And look at what I can do.” Because we’re spending so much time using these things and now with the pandemic, literally our waking hours are consumed in these things. And all of a sudden you find that you have this superpower where you can make these things in this world that we’re living in. And it’s not as hard maybe as you thought it was. And. it’s an incredible rush that comes being good at the craft bit of it. And, also, the tools are evolving so fast and giving us so much power. Something like Figma an amazing design tool that allows you to do the craft bit, but it allows you to do it collaboratively in a way that was not possible before, or was possible, but much more clumsily. And that’s just the latest in a long sequence of tools that make the craft part of this so much more engaging, easier, faster, more compelling, more convincing, and, there’s this allure to the screen-level discussions of this work. It’s like, Oh man, I bet, we can get lost in discussions about accessibility and contrast and things like, Fitts’ Law, or, you know, all these things that go into making a compelling user interface. And, it’s also a lot of fun, so much fun to do this stuff, to put a button on the screen and then see it work when you click on it. And we are drawn to these things. And the thing is we can get drawn to them at the exclusion of thinking about How, and more importantly, Why are we doing this? And that is where having some theoretical grounding is helpful. And not just theoretical grounding, like, knowledge of history. Like, I think all three of us are more or less contemporaries. And at this point our careers, we’ve seen ideas that were being discussed very fervently a while back kind of resurface with little to no acknowledgement to the previous efforts. And that is something where I also think we could do a better job as designers in just knowing that designing for digital now, well, it doesn’t have the long history that architecture has for sure, but it’s not exactly a spring chicken either, you know? And there is a history there and it’s worth knowing. Peter: One of my favorite things is when mobile app designers discover navigation. They realize, “Oh wait, hierarchies and clear labeling.” And you see these Medium posts of folks who’ve invented navigation in whatever context they’re in. Jorge: Funny enough, it’s apropos. Just yesterday, I was having a critique session with students and one of the students showed sketches of a UI that is meant to be organic. And we were having a discussion about what organic means in this context. And one of the silver linings to our current remote way of teaching is that you can instantly bring up your screen and share stuff, right? So, I shared the work of Kai, I think his name is pronounced Kai Krause. Peter: Yeah, I was wondering if you were going in a Power Tools direction. Yes. Jorge: Right. And the students hadn’t seen that work because it’s now, what, 25 years old. Maybe more. So, it’s been a couple of cycles, at least, that that work’s been out of the general discussion, but there is some precedent there. Jesse: I once had the dubious distinction of giving a talk about our field that reviewed some history, but really kind of started in 2000. And Donald Norman was sitting in the front row and he did have some things to say to me after the talk. Peter: At least he didn’t say them during the talk. Jesse: So yeah, we all have our indulgences in ahistoricism. And honestly, at the time we started, there were people who had been doing a lot of work and research and theoretical work around designing for digital, but it had been sort of locked away from practice in the halls of academia and the proceedings of the ACM SIG CHI conference. Music break 1 Peter: I want to go back to craft. You talked, Jorge, about the importance of craft your reveling in Figma, and as you say those things, I get nervous. Now, I’m not a proper design leader anymore. I’ve become some form of management consultant, but if I were to go back and become a VP of Design, I haven’t opened a design tool in 10 to 15 years, apart from Keynote. Any design that I do, I do in Keynote. And I’m wondering your thoughts on that relationship to craft as leaders grow, and what’s important to maintain and hang on to, and what maybe they can let go of. Thinking about it also from your vantage point at the other end of the spectrum, where you’re teaching the next generation of practitioners that will be coming into these people’s organizations and these folks are gonna be primarily steeped in craft. And how do you help leaders navigate just enough craft and maintain relevance, recognizing though that they’re not going to be Figma jockeys, likely. Jorge: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think that the desire to have pride in your craft is something that should not diminish as you grow in your career. Perhaps the manifestations of the craft change. When you were talking about this, I was thinking is like, what is my craft—is the craft aspect of my own work? I think that these days I devote as much time writing as I do drawing things. I find that we are communicating so much now asynchronously using text. I wrote this blog post a couple of years ago about way that I see career progressions in design. The analogy I used is that it’s a progression from very thin markers to flat markers, in that when you start your career, you’re expected to be very focused on the details. So, you use like fine liners. And then as you move on, you’re going to be working at a perhaps lower level of fidelity, but I’d like to think of it as a higher level of abstraction, perhaps. So, you move on through Sharpies and then eventually to whiteboard markers. And you have to have a good mix of folks in the team with different marker widths, because if it’s all theory and all abstraction and all understanding how the big parts fit together, and there’s no execution, then it’s not going to work. You need people who are passionate about the fine lines who are going to be working on that. And at least for me, the craft that I aspire to at this stage in my career has to do with helping design leaders manifest and make tangible these very vague, hard-to-pin-down complex, abstract ideas that come with dealing with things like strategy, with organizing complex messes, the whole “wicked problem” thing. I think that that’s where design ultimately really shines, right? Like these ill-formulated situations and no one knows how to tackle the thing and you have to start somewhere. And designers can come in and take a first stab at the thing and we know it’s going to be wrong because it’s ill-informed, but the very act of putting something in the world and testing it is going to produce data that is going to lead down this process to refining it, making it a better fit to the context and the problem at hand, because this, by the way, this is also related to writing. When you write, I’m, again, I’m going to speak in the first person, when I write something, that helps me understand what I’m thinking, the act of having to put it into words that I expect I will be communicating to someone else, forces me to bring it down from this miasma I have up here in the meat computer and articulate it in a coherent way. And design does that too, for these complex wicked problems. And I think that as you move up to leadership roles, you’re not going to be drawing UIs, but you’re going to be thinking about what is the problem that we’re trying to solve here. What are the resources we bring to bear on this thing? How do we best deploy those resources? Where are we falling short? What are our competitors doing? Who are our competitors? There’s all of these questions that come to bear. And there is a craft to making those tangible too. And that’s how we should aspire to think about craft as we grow in our design careers. We shouldn’t think that we’re leaving craft behind; we should think that we’re applying our craft to a higher-level problem. Jesse: A lot of the design leaders I’ve spoken to are getting kind of squeezed in their ability to bring that kind of abstract craft that you’re describing, because they’re getting squeezed from top and bottom into a production management orientation, because that is the value of design as the people above them in the organization understand it. And that’s also the craft orientation that the people on their teams have, right? So, they don’t actually have any peers who want to engage with them at the fat marker level. Jorge: Yep. I have observed that as well. We have to remember that design is still a fairly new function within organizations. I don’t think that the role of design in organizations has settled in the same way that other functions that have been around longer. Peter: But, but I wrote a book! Jorge: I know you did. And I think that that book represents tremendous progress towards the professionalization of design in organizations. I don’t think that most organizations are there yet. I think it’s going to take a shift in mindset as to what the role of design is. Peter: The role of, like, the design team? Design as a practice? “Design” becomes one of those slippery words. Jorge: Yeah. What design is for… Jesse:  As a function. Jorge: That’s right. Design as a function of the organization. And it might be that the function that I’m calling for is not centralized in the design team. Perhaps there’s a strategy team. Perhaps there is an operations team, I don’t know. But I’m saying it would be helpful for folks in those groups to have access to design resources, because they can help understand situations and respond to situations in a different way. It gives you a different ability as a team. I If the only tool that you have available to understand a problem is an Excel spreadsheet, you’re going to be gravitating towards solutions that can be answered by an Excel spreadsheet. Peter: I want to build on this, ‘cause I was thinking about the Excel spreadsheet as this analogy. Like, Excel is everywhere. Literally every function in a business, every department in a business, is using some form of a spreadsheet. And in the same way, could you argue that design as a tool, as a practice, could also be anywhere that Excel is being used, with the possible exception of actual accounting and finance. Anywhere that Excel is being used, you could probably also use design approaches as a balance to whatever Excel is bringing to it in terms of helping you structure, organize your ideas. That’s more the convergent parts. So, what’s the divergent part? How are we opening up an opportunity space and exploring and thinking, before getting to where Excel would be helpful in terms of organizing our thinking. And to the point you were saying about the immaturity of design, you do see some organizations that have small design thinking teams that end up operating as consultants. So as orgs grow, the bulk of the team is doing what Jesse’s talking about, which is production and delivery of design material. And then some teams have created a small design thinking, design facilitation, Google sprints, whatever it is, style practice, that works as a consultancy, sprinkling design approaches to different parts of the business that might ask for it. Now, I think what you’re arguing is that that second function should probably become more standardized and probably bigger as a reflection of what the value is that a design function is bringing the business. It’s not just in the creation of assets for products, but a way of problem solving that could help throughout the business. And so, it’s starting to happen. There’s these little green shoots. And another green shoot that reflects on what we were mentioning earlier, in terms of Jesse’s being squeezed, but your recognizing the role of the fat marker, is starting to see more, call them principal designers or design architects who are operating in that more abstract, strategic level, usually at the hand of a design executive who just doesn’t have time to think strategically, to think creatively, because they’re running an org, but recognizes there’s a gap. That is just starting, but it is starting. And so, we’re seeing savvy organizations poking at these new ways or new expressions of design work that isn’t just, how do I make my product development go? Or how do I make my marketing go? Jorge: it’s incredibly encouraging that there are shoots happening, emerging. I wonder, and this is something that is always in the back of my mind as I think about this stuff, I wonder the degree to which such teams can be effective as organs of the organization, as opposed to consultants, like you were saying. Just because, once you are a part of the organization, you are suddenly beholden to the same environment and political forces as all the other parts of the organization. And a part of the value that this approach brings is allowing you to make connections that open up different avenues for possibility. And so much becomes closed once you are an organ of the organization. All of a sudden your incentive structures are in alignment with the incentive structures of the other teams that you’re going to be collaborating with. So, I think it’s really encouraging and really fascinating that it’s happening and that it is emerging. And it is happening at a time when I don’t see the prevalence of external consultancies in the same way that we’ve seen in the past. I often wonder if we are overdue for a return of that kind of model to greater prominence, if in no other regard than this one. Peter: Yeah. I mean, I think Erika’s point, when she talked about this, that, historically, design consultancies were turning the crank and doing the craft, the detailed-level craft. And now there’s this opportunity for, essentially, design-inflected management consulting to operate at that level. But we haven’t quite seen it yet. but that seems to be where there’s potential. Jorge: To talk a little bit about Excel, because this is something that also came to mind when you were talking about that. I use Excel a lot and I like it a lot. It’s a super useful tool. I think that the challenge comes with premature structuring of things. It’s like when you have a grid of cells, an empty grid of cells, the cells are screaming to be filled with things. Peter: In a very specific, like, two-dimensional matrix. Yeah. Jorge: Absolutely. Right. Was it McLuhan that talked about the tools, the tools making us, I don’t remember the exact words, but… Jesse: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Yes. Jorge: Right. Which, to circle back to architecture, Churchill said the same thing about buildings, right? And these things are true. We live in these things and they inform the way that we think about problems and that we think about the situations that we’re dealing with. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, that sort of thing. And the particular Excel hammer is one that calls for greater precision than what is required at junctures where problems are not well formulated. Peter: Right. When you’re in that fuzzy front end, you want an environment that enables the exploration of the fuzziness and Excel can’t handle the fuzzy. Jorge: It can’t, that’s right.  Music break 2 Peter: You wrote a book called Living In Information. And I’m thinking about architecture, and, as any homeowner knows, the structures that we’re living in have been often quite predetermined by things like codes and standards, and there’s only so much wiggle room that an architect can bring to those codes and standards. And I’m curious, Jorge, as someone who has thought more about living in information, living in interactivity, living in digitalia, your thoughts on the role of codes, architecture-like codes, building codes, standards within the design of the environments that we are living within. Jorge: That’s an interesting question, and one that I think has answers in a couple of levels. One level is there are standards, and then there are regulations. And I think that those things are different. And, again, I’m going to call out the fact that the three of us are old, yeah, pointing out that I believe the three of us started in this field very early on in the history of the web specifically. That has given me a vantage point that has allowed me to see the emergence of structural standards in a medium that was something of a blank slate. I remember making my first webpage. I think I was using Notepad on Windows. And facing this blank screen and then typing in the tags. And you could type anything into that. There was no pre-dictated structure. There was nothing that said, “The corporate logo should be in the upper left corner. And then navigation bar shall span across the top of the screen.” In fact, there was quite a bit of experimentation there. You might recall that there was a lot of argument about whether the navbar should be on the left or on the right or at the top, or what have you. And, over time, some ways of doing that have worked better than others, and they have become standards in some way. And, the analogy that I always think of, and I think that I heard this from our friend, Andrea Resmini is, filmmaking. The very first movies were basically, someone set a camera and pointed at a stage and recreated what you would see in a play, because that’s how they understood time-based storytelling like that to happen. And it took a while for things like jump cuts and dissolves and the narrative, the grammar of cinema to emerge. And I don’t believe that there are regulations around what those things should be. There are standards though. And if you go to see a movie, you expect it to have three acts, and you expect certain ways for the story to unfold in the screen, even if you can’t describe it, you are now a sophisticated reader of that text, if you will. And there’s nothing inherent in the medium that dictates that. In fact, there’s a lot of interesting movies that may be hard to watch, but they’re very interesting, that don’t follow those conventions. And when I think about policies and standards and such, I’m much more interested in the structures that have emerged from use, and how they’ve become quantified into a sort of grammar. The logo on the upper left and the navigation bar across the top is a structural construct that we take for granted, but it’s not natural. Policies, regulations are a completely different domain that I am not as qualified to talk about, but I see a lot of movement happening around things like GDPR, and how we deal with privacy online, which is affecting our online experience. We have all of these popups now asking us to confirm whether we accept cookies in uppercase, and that’s the nature of responding to legal constructs. Jesse: Building codes and regulations and so forth, exist to constrain the choices of designers and builders to keep those choices within what is perceived to be a safe context, so that people aren’t making reckless choices that hurt the users of their buildings or their websites or digital products and so forth. And in our area, the conversation around creating that kind of safety has revolved more around professional certification for designers. That designers should have to meet some sort of standard of not just expertise, but also behavior on an ongoing basis, in order to keep doing what they’re doing. And I wonder how you both as a practitioner and as an educator, feel about this prospect of professional certification as a way of creating more of those standards to create more of that safety for users. Peter: And I want to add, Were you ever licensed as an architect? Fid you go through that process in architecture, or did you not get that far? Jorge: I practiced as an architect for a very short time. I practiced for about a year and a half. And then the web happened. Peter: But you would have needed to be licensed, then… Jorge: Yeah, I was, I graduated… but the reason why I hesitate to answer definitively is that I was practicing in Panama, in my home country. And there is a licensing board there, which I passed, but I think it’s different from licensing. And even in the United States, it varies from state to state,   Peter: I just, I wanted to make sure, like Jesse and I, have never been licensed. Jesse: To do anything, ever. Peter: You’ve had that experience of being essentially, I guess, tested to make sure that you know what you’re doing well enough, that things that you build, aren’t gonna collapse in on the people who use them. Jorge: It was early on in my career. But I could call myself an architect, which actually, is a thing, because in some countries you cannot call yourself an architect if you have not gone through that process. That’s the whole certification thing. And I’m of two minds about it. It makes a lot of sense in some regards, the argument put forth by Mike Monteiro in his book, Ruined by Design. We have tremendous power in these roles, especially when so many people are using things like Facebook and Google and Twitter, the people designing those experiences are perhaps the design professionals that have the most leverage of any design professionals in human history, just because of the scale of those things, there’s so many people using them. And, how I see the argument for certification is that certification would enforce a set of standards that would aim to keep the people who use the systems designed by certified people safer than people who are using things designed by people who are just coming at it without any kind of grounding. And I think that that works for architecture, in part, because the profession has been around for so long, and we know so much about the properties of what makes a building safe, versus what makes a building unsafe. In designing for digital environments, even though I’ve said that there’s a couple of decades now of history, or more than that, but it’s not hundreds of years, like what we have in architecture. There’s still so much that is emergent, and I would worry about, yeah, certification is in tension to our ability to push boundaries in some way. In fact, I think that you want to certify things to keep people within boundaries so that you… Peter: stop the boundary pushing, limit the boundary pushing? Jorge: Right. And it feels like this field still has so much boundary pushing to do. Jesse: I don’t know. You know, GDPR exists because there was a little bit too much boundary pushing going on. Jorge: Yeah, for sure. Jesse: The argument that certification is a bad thing because it may potentially constrain creative exploration, sounds like a very close cousin to a “move fast and break things” kind of mentality, which, we can see how many things that mentality has already broken. And so, at some point, you have to weigh what is the tradeoff here. Pushing the boundaries of design, exploring new possibilities, bringing new things to the table creatively, really being able to discover the potentials and the limits of the medium. You have to weigh that against, how many people are getting trampled in the process of your creative explorations, and how many bad actors, not necessarily designers, but bad actors on the business side, bad actors all around us, can leverage our willingness to go explore and push boundaries with them toward ends that don’t serve the larger good. Jorge: You’re absolutely right. And is what is so challenging about this that I can totally see the argument for certification. My point, though, is that we are in an industry that is moving so fast, that you may end up establishing policies that are over-determined for a particular medium or a particular implementation. That happened within the professional experience of many folks listening to the show. They remember the world before the iPhone and then the world after the iPhone. And if you had overly specified the policies for the world before the iPhone, all of a sudden, the iPhone made at least some of them less relevant, and maybe you would end up with a situation where you would be nudged into the direction of making a mobile interface more similar to the desktop interface, you know? I think that the things that we want to have guard rails around are things like data protection and making sure that the systems we use do not discriminate unfairly against people. And we’ve had things like the laws that protect folks with disabilities, for example, which have been successful in encouraging companies, designers, et cetera, to create things that are more universally accessible. And I would expect that when we talk about policies and certification, we are talking about that level. And not the things like the UI level. We’re not going to demand that designers do this on the screen. We are going to demand that they take care of people’s data, for example. That would make sense. Did you all see the demo of this Elon Musk company that is doing the brain link thing? I forget what it’s called. The essence of it is that it is a device that you implant in your skull. And it’s actually an interesting service design thing, because part of the, quote-unquote product, includes the robot that drills into your skull. So, you sit under this machine that drills a hole in your skull and places a coin sized sensor. It attaches some ways to your nervous system from which then you can connect to your phone or to another digital device and do things. I don’t know how feasible that is, but you can imagine something like that being feasible, and they demonstrated it with pigs. And I would expect that if that is a thing in the world, the design challenges around that, and the ethical challenges around that are many ways thornier than the design challenges that we’re dealing with when we’re dealing with screen-based systems. I wonder if policies and certifications that are created in a world where the dominant means for interacting with information are screen-based, are going to serve us well in a world where we have direct connections to our nervous systems. So this is not an easy thing to contemplate because it is a very fast moving field. It’s awesome talking with you all. Jesse: Jorge, this has been great. Thank you. You can find Jorge Arango and links to all of his work on the internet, on his website at http://jarango.com. That’s J A R A N G O.com. He’s also @jarango on Twitter. You can find Peter Merholz and myself on Twitter as well. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. This podcast is not on Twitter yet, but it does have a website. That’s http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode. You’ll also find a contact form where you can share your feedback with us. We love to hear your thoughts. We’ll see you next time.

Transcript Vivianne: It was kind of a culture shock, honestly, to the switch into UX, this field that raves about how human-centered they are, and how little they talked about doing the personal work required to actually be human-centered. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz, Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Together: And we’re Finding Our Way Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show, in a conversation recorded two days after the 2020 US Presidential election, as the votes were still being counted and uncertainty hung heavy in the air, we’re joined by Vivianne Castillo, UX research leader and educator, to talk about, appropriately enough, trauma. Trauma in the workplace, trauma in our lives, and trauma in society. We’ll talk about what UXers can learn from human services professionals, and we’ll talk about acknowledging the true power of designers to not just help people, but harm them as well. Vivianne: I guess, a little bit of context, I come from a counseling and helping service professional background. So I made a career switch into UX probably about, I don’t know, four or five years ago now, time means nothing at the moment, but a few years ago, and initially when I broke into UX, I was really excited about how this industry talked about being human-centered and empathy and I remember winning a scholarship to go to the O’Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco and super excited to be listening to these leaders in the field talk about these topics. Talk about the role of diversity and inclusion in tech and design. And at the end of the conference, I was sitting in my hotel room, just kind of reflecting on what I had heard and I was like, “Wow, like this is bullshit,” when it came to how UX professionals were talking about empathy. And I have a different take on it. And part of that is just from my training as a counselor and a therapist. But when I started to initially speak and write within the UX field, it was about diversity, equity, and inclusion, how the way we talk about it tends to be BS within the industry. I talked a lot about the role of shame when it comes to research and design, and really, for me, there’s a time and place for personas, journey maps, et cetera, et cetera. Those things are important, but I’m more interested in that deeper human undercurrent when it comes to our work. And I think trauma especially is a topic that we need to be talking more about. I think when we look at 2020 in and of itself, it’s just been a year of, not necessarily stress, it’s been a year of trauma. You have the trauma of COVID and the pandemic, which also just impacts folks in the majority versus minority employees very differently. Folks in the black and Latinx community were more likely to know folks who have passed away from COVID than their white colleagues. You have the trauma of June where Corporate America kind of realized, I guess, they’re racist. And so now you have this month of June where you’re having a lot of these companies, a lot of these well-meaning colleagues try and have these conversations. And, in many ways, often, deeper traumatizing their black colleagues and underrepresented minorities. And then you have, political trauma of this election. And in America, specifically, politics is life or death for minorities. So, it’s been a very stressful time, a very traumatic time to say the least, and that impacts the workplace. And if there’s one thing that 2020 has taught us, and has maybe reinforced probably more so for the majority, it’s that you can’t dichotomize our personal life from our professional life anymore. Jesse: This question in my brain is being asked by Peter: What do you mean when you use the term “trauma” here? Vivianne: In its very simplest form, trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event. Sometimes you’ll hear people talk about big-T trauma, little-T trauma. So little-T trauma is things like, you’re moving away as a kid, or a sudden disruption in maybe like a major plan you had this year, like going to a wedding or having that really big birthday party. Whereas big-T trauma, think about, like, physical assault, think about the pandemic. And there’s different types of trauma. You have acute trauma, again, these more, like, smaller moments of emotional responses to terrible events. You have chronic trauma. These are things that are dragged out over a period of time. And then you have something that’s called secondary or vicarious drama. Vicarious trauma comes from being repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma and their stories of traumatic events. I mean, 2020 in a nutshell, right? the way that vicarious trauma specifically plays out is things like frustration, anxiety, irritability, uh, disturbed sleep, or like nightmares, problems managing personal boundaries, loss of connection with self or others, or a loss of sense of your own identity and your values. It definitely runs a spectrum. Peter:  I’m wondering if you feel that all UX practice and practitioners warrant this level of depth, regardless of the problem space people are working within, or is this something that is more around, well, yeah, if you’re working in healthcare, sure, you need to understand these things, but if you’re trying to just help people listen to music, okay, you get a pass on matters of trauma. Like, how do we calibrate it, so we don’t feel like we have to be all trauma all the time, but that we are engaging appropriately with some of these deeper, heavier concerns, even in areas that might not seem like it warrants it. Vivianne: Even if you’re designing a to-do list app, I think that if you’re going to profess to be human-centered, you need a more holistic approach to that. And part of having a more holistic approach to being human-centered is understanding things like trauma. And I get that, naturally, no one wakes up in the morning, they’re like, “Man, I really want to dive into trauma. I just want to, like, read about it all day. I want to sit in that.” That’s not the expectation nor is that the way that even folks who have to deal with these topics, how they handle it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how UX professionals in particular tend to align themselves with the product and tech industry, when in reality, I think we need to align ourselves more with the human service industry. And when I think about what a human service professional is, I think that human service professionals are individuals who uniquely approach the objective of meeting human needs through an interdisciplinary knowledge base, focusing on prevention as well as remediation of problems, and maintaining a commitment to improving the overall quality of life of people. And so, that’s social workers, that’s counselors, public administrators, but that sounds a lot like UX professionals. And so, when it comes to trauma, for me, it’s not even necessarily all about, How can I make sure that we aren’t making product decisions that are causing trauma? I do think that’s important topic as well, but it’s also about understanding how does trauma impact you and your work and your ability to collaborate with people, your ability to be innovative, your ability to be vulnerable enough, to know when to ask for help with your teammates and your colleagues. So, it’s a part of just understanding how to work within a work environment that’s collaborative and it’s bringing out the best of your work as well. Peter: If you look at the history of UX and HCI, the way that we choose to understand humans emerged from trying to figure out how people use tools. It was essentially applying that to software interfaces. So, a lot of, like, cognitive psychology was the primary means of understanding people so that we could design software that they could understand and manipulate and use. Something that I hadn’t thought of, until you just mentioned it, is how because of the degree to which software is shot through, infuses literally every aspect of our lives now, that simple information processing approach to user research, which, again, is the foundation upon which most UX research is understood, is no longer sufficient. This is now a social, societal concern. How do we evolve this practice of UX to recognize it’s not just about behavior with software interfaces, but something deeper and more fundamental that these software interfaces are now enabling everywhere? Vivianne: I think a part of it is just recognizing that in the beginning of UX and the development of it, if you’re looking at the founding UX forefathers, a lot of them are white able-bodied men. And so a lot of these decisions that they’ve been making, when it comes to software and products, has always been affecting, and oftentimes excluding, folks who are in marginalized communities or folks who are minorities. So I think it’s moreso recently the reason why we’re having more conversations about this is because now you have four generations in the workplace. And Millennials and Gen Z, we’re more diverse generations, where we also grew up being able to talk more freely about these topics in the workplace and in school settings. And so, you’re looking at what I think is a clash of different generations and different points of view on the importance and the urgency of talking about these things. And so when it comes to, how do we start to signal to the rest of the UX community, that there are deeper elements and even just consequences to our design decisions and our ability to apply our awareness of depth of humanity to our work streams, I think a couple of things need to happen. I think, one, we need to elevate more voices within UX leadership that aren’t from the majority. I mean, my greatest fear is that there will be certain leaders in UX who will attempt to rebrand themselves for the sake of being relevant and talking on things and issues that really, they have no level of expertise or business talking about when they could be pulling a seat to the table and bringing other voices to the conversation. And then the other thing is, I think it’s just reminding the UX community that we are not special snowflakes. There are industries, there are professions who have done very deep work on actually being holistically human-centered. I think about the American Counseling Association and they have a code of ethics and even in their code of ethics, they talk about the importance of self-care and it being an ethical imperative. And, the importance of understanding when you are physically, emotionally, spiritually even, burnt out and it’s affecting your ability to perform. And reason why they even call that out in their code of ethics is because they recognize the ability to cause harm to people if you aren’t operating at your best self. We need to really lean into what human service professionals are talking about, and even what they’re training their professions in school. I think UX professionals, we pride ourselves on all things empathy and advocating for people, and I think that’s right. But I also think that what comes often with roles where extending empathy is a key part of your responsibilities is compassion fatigue. And compassion fatigue, this is not a new or sexy, like, phrase or word. Again, this is something that is commonly talked about among human service professionals. Even teachers experience this, nurses experience this, but compassion fatigue is always going to be experienced by people where extending empathy is a core aspect of what they do. And really, compassion fatigue is the profound, like, emotional and physical erosion that takes place when folks are unable to refuel and regenerate. So imagine if UX professionals actually understood that at some point in their career, they’re going to experience compassion fatigue. This isn’t, “Oh, I’m never going to experience it.” It’s a question of when and being able to recognize those symptoms: difficulty concentrating, increase likelihood of you isolating yourself, insomnia, overeating, excessive use of alcohol and drugs. What would our approach to being human-centered be like to other people, if we could actually be more human-centered and conscientious of ourselves. Jesse: As you were talking about the need for UX professionals to start looking to other models for their profession and for their practices, to what human service professionals are already doing and already understand around these things, I noticed that this very much goes against what seems to be the trend in UX these days, which is toward increasing quantification, and people building these elaborate systems of metrics to support design decisions, and the whole set of issues that you’re talking about are things that can’t be captured by those quantitative methods. So it feels like there’s this two-fold kind of thing. At first, you’ve got to pull people’s attention away from the numbers toward the qualitative and holistic view of what’s going on. And then even beyond that, then you’ve got to educate them about trauma or the potential for trauma or the potential for harm that’s created there. And all of that is just within a product design and development process, which is separate from the whole other side of the equation for leaders, which is how do they manage their organization and how do they structure their teams? How do they work with their teams and create cultures that are aware of these issues? To your point, you can’t really separate how trauma affects us as practitioners from the role that trauma plays in product design anymore. And I am wondering, How leaders can improve their awareness of how these issues play out within their team? Vivianne: I do think you can quantify this. In my current role, I work with C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies, so I’m often having a lot of these types of conversations where I’m leveraging primary and secondary research, both qual and quant, in order to help them be more holistically human-centered in their approach to business development and strategy and how technology and product can power that. And so, I remember one time talking to an executive and they’re like, “Yeah, all of this stuff is good, but at the end of the day, this is about data, this is about numbers.” He’s like, “I think the whole, human-centered thing is cute. but this is about data and numbers.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool.” So, like, people create data and data comes from people. So you need to talk about people and understand that it’s about both to quantify it a little bit, even, to some of the comments you’re saying. Well, think about when it comes to trauma, and, like, burnout, when it comes to compassion fatigue. Think about the way that this impacts the business on a dollar-sign level. So for example, I am fully anticipating a spike in FMLA leave between now and probably January as well as in the summer. I think this whole year, a lot of companies, teams, UX teams have been talking about stress and burnout and they have really missed the ball by not talking about trauma. think about what that means when it comes to, now you have to spend time hopefully finding a contractor to fill in an aspect of work, because one of your employees is taking an absence of leave. Think about the increased amount of time people are spending off, and what does that mean when it comes to workflow and production? Think about folks who are, realizing, “Hey, like, actually my workplace is… this is not conducive to my mental or emotional wellbeing. This is toxic. And I’m leaving.” Think about the amount of money, now, these companies are spending, having to recruit to interview, and to find someone else to replace that person. So for me, a trauma-informed workplace and team is also just a part of good business when it comes to having a sustainable workforce. I’m blanking on the other question that you asked, but… Jesse: Yeah, so my other question was, given that those things are all these untracked or relatively invisible costs to these organizations, how do leaders bring the awareness up of those impacts? How do they improve their own awareness of those impacts in order to be able to take action on it? Vivianne: I mean first and foremost, it starts with education. It’s hard to actually understand the impact that it’s having on your team if you aren’t aware of the complexity of this and how it’s playing out, within not only the workplace, but just in general, how trauma operates. So, one thing that I’ve been doing is really just educating leaders on trauma and the difference, too, between trauma and burnout. Also assessing their confidence level and being able to talk about these topics and lead your team through difficult times, whether that is an election, whether that is protests and riots that are happening in June, and being able to really, in many ways, do a self-assessment to understand not only your ability to talk about things like trauma, but the undercurrent things that are also driving those conversations, like racial injustice and inequity. Especially with this election, you can’t necessarily lead your teams, and hopefully they are diverse teams, you can’t necessarily lead them without being able to talk about race and racism and hatred. That’s very much a part of that conversation. So, when I’m teaching and equipping leaders how to have these conversations, I’m also teaching them about the difference between shame and guilt, because more times than not, when you’re talking about things like racism or politics and trauma, shame and guilt are often triggered. Guilt is, “I made a mistake,” whereas shame is, “I am the mistake.” And more times than not, especially for folks in the majority, they tend to experience shame in these conversations, these messages of, “Oh, you’re saying I’m the mistake. You’re saying that I’m the problem.” And then that’s where the defensiveness comes in. That’s where that fight-flight-or-freeze comes in when it comes to these conversations. So, I’m often equipping people as, “Hey, physiologically, here’s what’s happening to you if you’re starting to experience shame.” And I’m also giving them tools of how do you ground yourself in that moment, so you can still be present and listen to your colleagues, listen to your team members as they’re processing and working through what’s happening, not only outside of the four walls, but within the four walls of work. Because the other thing, too, that I’ve been teaching people about trauma is that often trauma agitates and triggers old trauma. So, I’m talking to a lot of folks right now who, yes, like, the world is a trash fire right now. But it’s also triggering former workplace trauma that people have experienced, right? Where they may be at an old job they didn’t feel safe, where they didn’t feel heard. I didn’t feel like they could take care of themselves. And so, it’s kind of bringing up some of those old experiences and those old feelings, and people are feeling frazzled. They don’t really know what to do with it. A lot of it is equipping people with grounding tools. How to recognize this within yourself versus other people, how to have language that you can use when confronting someone on some of these difficult topics, or if someone is saying something that is triggering, how do you actually have a productive conversation with that person? Music break 1 Jesse:  You mentioned giving leaders grounding tools to help them ride out whatever shame or other feelings of their own that might come up as they engage with these issues, because it’s much easier to run away from those things if you know, you’re going to have to face your own shit when they come up, right. What is, uh, simple way for people to get started with those grounding practices? Vivianne: I’ve encouraged leaders to create an emotion journal. So, I have a print out of this emotion wheel. Most people can’t name, a lot of emotions, but, I’ll have them do an assignment where, hey, on Mondays, I want you to take note of the times when you felt happy, where you felt excited or exhilarated, whatever is within that slice of that emotion pie. Or Hey, Wednesday, I want you to reflect on the last 24 hours and think about the times where you felt frustrated or angry or defensive, and what caused that, what was the line of thought that led you there? It’s an awareness exercise. I think a lot of people don’t pause long enough to learn about themselves, and so I have toolbox of different activities that I share with people of, here are some activities you can do, whether it’s a weekly or daily basis, to help you learn more about you, and help you to earn your PhD in you. Another thing that I encourage people to do as well is, again, at the end of the day, to have time of reflection. One particular activity I encourage someone to do was around power dynamics. And so I had them for a few days journal about the different people that they interacted with in their work and whether they had a perception of that person having more power or less power than them. In that conversation, in that relationship, and then talking about the impact that that has and how they talk to that person, their willingness to share ideas with that person and potential barriers to actually hearing from that person. So yeah, I think some simple activities like that actually go a long, long, long way. Jesse: It seems like just simply creating the space for reflection, regardless of what the practice is, is a key. Vivianne: Yeah. And it, it sounds simple, but whew. I mean, even the way we’ve taught folks about UX, that’s not something we teach people. It’s, like, be human-centered, but that whole actually doing the personal work required to truly be human-centered, that’s just kind of, I guess it’s just going to happen. It’s a given, but it’s something that we actually don’t prioritize and we don’t necessarily view as a part of our professional development or professional competencies. So I think that as a field, we could just do a lot better in recognizing that aspect and how this plays a part in our professional responsibility. Again, something that I admire about human service professionals is that recognition that, the things that are happening from your personal life outside of the four walls from work impacts the way that you show up in your professional life. Even ethics. Within my master’s in counseling program, that was semester one of my program. And every semester after that, we always talked about ethics. We always talked about what’s happening in our personal lives and how that impacts our relationship with our work, with our clients, with the experiences that we’re trying to craft and create. And we’re encouraged to be intentional—whether that’s accountability, whether as a counselor to go see another counselor, it’s just viewed as an ethical responsibility, as a professional imperative, actually within our work. And so it was kind of a culture shock, honestly, to the switch into UX, this field that raves about how human-centered they are, and how little they talked about doing the personal work required to actually be human-centered. Peter: Right. I mean, for UX it’s all around the methodologies. We learn tools to understand people that aren’t ourselves, to understand other people. I remember back, Jesse, to when you worked on Charmr, and Charmr was a kind of a vision project that Adaptive Path did around diabetes and managing your condition. And I remember the team who was trying to practice good human-centered design, coming back to the office after talking to Type 2 diabetics. And they were wrecked, hearing about the circumstances that these folks were in. And it was the first time I witnessed that, right. Usually when you’re working in boring software context, trying to help SaaS companies SaaS better, you don’t get that kind of engagement when you’re doing user research. But, we were not set up to enable or support these folks in managing those challenges beyond kind of a generalized, humane awareness of like, “Oh, we should give that person some space to deal with this thing that they’re processing,” kind of separate almost from the work. So I’m reflecting on how there’ve been moments in my career where I’ve seen it, but it felt like I could, I guess, isolate it on like, “Well, if you’re going to do something that obviously engages with the more challenging parts of human existence, yes. we can be more attuned to that.” And I think what you’re pointing out is, like, basically everything right now is kind of… I guess what I’m realizing is like the moment we encourage us as professionals to engage with people, customers, users, or whatever, there’s a line crossed that we haven’t been aware of where we’re inserting ourselves into somebody else’s context, if we’re doing it right, and are now exposing ourselves to all that stuff. And we have in no way equipped ourselves as a community, as a profession, to handle that even a little bit. I mean, it’s just not even… I have never heard of… Maybe if you come at it from matters of sociology and anthropology, right? You see some people with user research backgrounds where they’re steeped in ethnography. I’m hoping that those professionals have some awareness. But if you’re coming at it from a interaction design or HCI background, not even, not even beginning to happen. And what this leads me to wonder is, something we haven’t talked about for a while, but the sense of professionalism and certification for the kind of work we do, so that we are being responsible and making sure that when we’re asking someone to engage in these practices, that they’ve done the work to really ready themselves. So, I guess I’m wondering, as you’ve shifted from counseling, which seems to have a degree of rigor around this understanding, to now UX and UX research, which clearly lacks it, how would you mature this profession and practice to account for this gap that you’re seeing between the world you came from to the world you’ve stepped into. Vivianne: Yeah, that’s a great question. The rigor from counseling comes from, again, an understanding of how close we work with people and our ability to cause harm. And again, that’s just something that, when I switched into UX, I’m like, okay, like everyone’s talking about being human-centered, but do they really understand how much power they have in these relationships with people, especially as researchers. I think that a lot of well-meaning researchers have unfortunately used empathy as a tool to exploit people. And so now, I think a silver lining to 2020, COVID, is people are having to encounter the complexity of people’s humanity, whether that’s within the workplace, outside of the workplace, society or not. And so when it comes to, What does it look like for us to close this gap? Can I dream? I think that these HCI programs would partner more closely with the human service programs, ideally like counseling and social work. There are practical ways to understand and increase your competencies when it comes to sensing and responding to people, like, what do you do when you are in a session with someone and they start to just cry. I’ve heard and have read materials from UX leaders who view those emotional outbursts as a badge of honor. And they viewed it as, “Oh, I’m so good at building rapport and empathy with this person. Man, like, I love those moments when participants cry with me.” And for me, that’s, especially as someone from a counseling background, that’s a very dangerous mindset to have, or hope to affirm that you are really good at building empathy and rapport. And the reason why is, because for all you know, you have not only triggered someone into emotional distress, but you actually probably don’t have the tools or the training to usher them out of that, to ground them before they leave your presence and go back on with the rest of their day. And we have an ethical responsibility to make sure that we are caring for our participants when they are with us and when we’re doing research sessions with them. I do think we need to work more closely with human service professionals like counselors and social workers. I personally think that there should be some element of continuing education that comes from specifically, again, human service classes and courses around this. I think unfortunately we do a lot of navel-gazing. We don’t lean as much on other industries and professions who have actually done deep work in being human-centered. And the other thing that can help close the gap is, especially from leaders who already have a level of recognition and sway in the industry, to step up and actually start asking those questions, do your own research, and take your own initiative and share what you’re learning. And come from a place of humility, not a place of, “I’m a leader. And, I’m an expert in all these things,” but help us industry learn how to be humble again. ‘Cause we’re not a humble industry. I think pride is one of the greatest occupational hazards for UX professionals, because it really blinds us from doing the work that could prevent us from causing harm to other people. Peter: You mentioned power and, power is a big factor here, something that you pointed out that I don’t think we understand is the power that we wield as designers. Because it’s a step removed, we’re like, “I don’t have power. I just make a thing.” Human service industry folks recognize that power because they’re dealing with that person face to face, or maybe in a small group. It’s very in the moment. Maybe through user research, you have a little bit of that. You’re not actually trying to make a change, usually,  with user research, you’re there to observe and take in. And so I don’t think we recognize, one, even that context, there’s a weird power dynamic going on that probably needs to be acknowledged. But then, two, the ultimate impact of the work that proceeds and how it is a reflection of the power dynamic between the organization producing the service the people who are receiving it. So there’s that part of the power dynamic. Something else that I was wondering was in the internal work that’s happening, something I’m sensitive to, as a leader, is if I try to facilitate conversations, because I’m the one with power, I don’t think the conversations are going to be necessarily as open and honest and good, because I fear, as a leader, people will take cues from me, even if I’m trying to be the avuncular sweater-wearing groovy guy, who’s just, like, wants to rap with you about what we’re dealing with. People know that I’m the VP and they’re not, and I can fire them or whatever those dynamics are. And so I’m wondering what counsel you have in terms of approaching these matters internally, so that power doesn’t overwhelm honesty and authenticity when, people are trying to engage in these conversations. Vivianne: Yeah, that’s a great question. And before I get to that, you talked about power with the researcher-participant relationship, there’s so much power there that we should talk more about. I have power, in that I know exactly where this interview, where I want it to go and where I’m going to take you. That’s power. I have power in the types of questions I want to ask, what emotional heartstrings, emotional responses I might want to hear from you. Some personal stories. My participant is unaware of the amount of emotional labor that I might be asking them to do in my session. Something that I tell people, too, is, Hey, when you’re doing interviews with folks, don’t wear an Apple watch, don’t wear your, like, nice, expensive jewelry or, have your, what, like $20,000 piece of artwork in the back, whatever it is. Those are power signals, ‘cause you don’t know that person, their background, what they’ve been through. So if you’re having on a call with them, whether it’s remote or, back in the day, in person, and you roll up with your Starbucks cup, you have your Apple watch on, nd, you’re just dressed to the nines, that introduces a unique power dynamic between you and that person. I have a checklist of things that I do before my interviews. I’ll jot down, What am I bringing into this interview? What assumptions may I already have about this person in this interview and how might that influence the way I’m going to interact with them? And what ways am I going to try and mitigate the power dynamic in this interview? So I, mentally and emotionally, walk through that so that I can try and mitigate that, or at least be aware of it as much as possible in my time with that participant. You asked a question about, the internal approach to power, specifically with leaders and how they show up with their teams. Easier said than done, but man, one of the quickest ways to mitigate that power is to be vulnerable. And, wow, leaders, like, it’s tough. It’s tough. And I get it, because there are written and unwritten rules of leadership, right? Things that we’ve been told of how we’re supposed to show up, how we’re supposed to lead, how we’re supposed to assure people that things are okay. But some of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in the workplace is… I remember being on a call with an executive. This was in June. A white man. And, they’re thinking about Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and they cried. And I was, like, Whoa. This is, like, it’s a reminder of, like, Oh, okay. Like, executives are people, too. Like, there’s something, there’s a commonality that we have between us, beyond we work at the same company. So moments of vulnerability. There are moments to acknowledge and surface other moments of connection between you and people who have less power than you. So, I have been on calls with executives where I always ask people, “How are you doing today?” ‘Cause I know it’s a day-by-day thing. And then, “How are you doing in general?” Like, that’s how I always phrase up that question with people. And I remember talking to an executive and they’re like, “Honestly, not good, not good today. This is happening, this is happening, and I’m not going to lie—I just don’t want to be at work today.” And this is someone who has more power than me. And I just told them, “Hey, I really appreciate you sharing that.” It makes me feel like I can be more real and honest, not only with leaders, but even my other colleagues, right. Because leaders are modeling how to show up to colleagues, that we have similar power dynamics, so it’s a trickle-down effect. So I say, one, I think vulnerability is really important. Two, I think, modeling behavior that, again, shows that you are aware of others and what others might be going through. So, I had an executive, who maybe only gave a few days’ notice, but it was like, “Hey, I need time off.” And they took a week off. Family and your wellbeing comes first, and everything else comes together. Not second. And I was like, great. Like that, for me, is a moment of mitigating power because now I’m giving myself more permission to show up in a way that’s authentic, that’s real about how I’m doing and where I’m at. And even in the midst of a project, if I need to step aside for a little bit, that’s going to help me and my teammates figure out, where to pick up the slack. How do we continue this momentum of collaboration instead of me just operating on E and it’s stifling the project that we’re working on together. Music break 2 Jesse: You talked about bringing people together around these issues. And one thing I think that happens within teams is people experience their own individual traumas, and then had to take them home with them, or, at best, maybe it comes up in a one-on-one with their manager at some point. And I wonder if there are ways that teams can collectively create more resilience. We talk about creating a culture for design within organizations that is a little bit of a safe space for risk, a safe place for exploring creative possibility, those kinds of safety, and my thesis is that you don’t get those kinds of safety unless you also have these other kinds of safety. Is it entirely on the manager and their individual relationships with team members to create that? Or is there some holistic way that it can be addressed almost at the organizational level? Vivianne: I think it’s both, I think managers play a huge role and, creating that type of environment. And really, when we talk about safety, we talk about vulnerability, we’re really talking about trust, and extending trust because you can’t have safety, vulnerability, without it. Managers play a huge role in that, how they show up, how they address teams in trying times. Even right now, with everything that’s going on in America, if you’re a manager and you haven’t addressed it, you better believe that you are creating a less safe environment for your team to talk about real things that are impacting them and might be impacting their work and work productivity. So yes, managers have a huge part to play. I think, too, there are certain things that you can do at a team level, where everyone is contributing to also creating that space. So, an activity that I’ve done on teams, this is something that I’ve also encouraged and done within Humanity Centered, which is our online course in community for folks in UX who want to do more of this deeper work, is we do something called a “check-in check-in.” So for example, with Humanity Centered, we have folks who go through their own self-assessment on where they are, and comfort level talking about some of these topics that we’re talking about today, when it comes to being able to have human-centered conversations and profit-centric conversations, the ability to talk about white supremacy and privilege and design, et cetera, et cetera. So, we ended up having these small groups that, through that self-assessment, we group people accordingly, and then we’ve had them doing this activity that we call the “check-in check-in.” So, “check-in check-in.” Basically, you have three minutes, and everyone goes in this small group. I’ve even done this with teams at work. And you start off the sentence with, “If you were to truly know me,” and then you just talk about what’s on your mind, whether that’s work stuff. It’s, “If you were to truly know me, this weekend was really great. I was able to go into social distance, walk with so-and-so,” or, “I’m actually not fully present because of A, B and C going on.” And it just a time for people just to share what’s on their mind and what’s on their heart. And, there’s three minutes and it’s… let’s say that person only wants to talk for two, then that remaining one minute is, everyone just kind of sits in silence and waits for the timer to run out. And then we give the group two minutes to respond. So, if you want to respond to that person, then you’d throw out the sentence with, “When I heard you say, blank blank blank. It made me think about,” or “made me feel” whatever it is. And so just an activity to help people, again, foster that element of safety and trust and vulnerability. Some people will share more, so people will share less, but it’s about creating that mutual respect for where people are at. And even just knowing how to better check up on your colleague and to show up with each other in the workplace. In the beginning of projects, encouraging folks to create what we call an alliance, where, before you kick off this project, let’s say it’s you, another researcher, and three designers, and you’re having a meeting where you’re talking about, What are the expectations for how we each think we should show up on this project? What are the things that you should know about me in order to get the best working experience with me? What’s our role, what are the roles that we’re going to agree to? If there’s disagreement? And, how do we want to figure out how much time do we want to spend on this or not? So we’re not spinning endlessly, my team, we have a rule. It’s called the “fucks given” rule. So, basically, like, we find ourselves on this problem, and we’re like spinning in debating it. And then we put it to a vote: Out of fucks given, where are you at? You at a hundred? Are you at zero? So, we got to figure out, can we just move us on? Is it really like a life or death thing? I’ll always say things like, “Hey, this is something I’m not willing to die on the hill on, but I do think it’s important.” So just being able to quickly suss out and agree how we want to handle conflict before a project is huge. And that is a part of creating safe spaces and a safe environment. So, there’s a lot of things, and even rituals, activities people can do. Jesse: Having tried to implement some vulnerability rituals inside a design organization, I found the degree of buy-in to be widely varying in terms of people’s willingness to be a part of those kinds of things, or to engage with them at more than, a superficial level. Vivianne: For some companies and teams, that’s a culture shift. What do you mean trust? What do you mean, like, actually being more human to each other? And so some of it takes time, and one of the biggest detriments to the teams, when it comes to this type of work, is they’re, like, “What’s the easy, simple thing I can do tomorrow and everyone will be bought in?” We’re complex people. So, this takes time for some teams, it means that there needs to actually be a deeper conversation about what are the barriers to trust or humility within the team and the culture. I’ve had teams where they bring in a third-party person to help facilitate those conversations. And I think more teams honestly, should think about doing that. Peter: Almost every team I work with is stretched too thin, not enough people to do the work that is expected of them. If I were to bring some of this wisdom back to other folks, the response would likely be, “We just don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to do the things that are expected of me. And now you want me to make time to do these things as well.” Rituals is probably a way to think about this. I think too often we do events. We’re going to do a two-day workshop. We’re going to get everybody in a room. We’re going to bring in a facilitator, who’s going to help you better understand trauma, self-care, whatever it is. We’re talking about emotional honesty, et cetera. And then that person’s going to leave, and we’re never going to talk about it again. As opposed to, thinking about it less as an event, and more like, start small, What are rituals, like the check-in check-out, that you can intersperse, and after a while it won’t feel like extra, it’ll just be the work. Vivianne: I agree. It’s, What are the small things that you can start to implement and build habits on? If the problem is, you’ve been eating like shit, the last six months you’ve gained the COVID 30, we’re going to bring in fitness instructor and do a half-day workout session, and then you’re going to go on with your life. That’s not gonna really cause change anywhere. It’s a Band-Aid on a much larger problem. Especially now, ‘cause I’m thinking about the context of trauma, I’m thinking about the context of compassion fatigue. Especially when you’re thinking about things like creating equitable and inclusive experiences in design. And I’m thinking about what’s happened this year, I’m thinking about June. And the reality is, just to be blunt, that white people aren’t used to sitting and suffering in pain this long about race and racism. And so white people are tired, you are tired when it comes to talking about race and racism and caring about people. And so I’m just aware, people are tired, people are traumatized. So, I always encourage teams, think about one or two things that you can do that start to build this muscle, because this is a muscle, right? To your point, you can’t just have a one, two-day workshop and then you don’t talk about it ever again. It’s a muscle that you have to build. And I encourage people to build it slow, but be intentional when you’re building it. So, I’m being intentional. Make sure that the habits that you’re implementing are life giving and are actually contributing to increasing an environment of trust and vulnerability. Resist the temptation to feel like you need to study and cram for this invisible exam that I guess everyone has to go through next week. This is something that takes time. I think people really get frustrated with that because they’re, like, “Well, I just want to do everything right now and get it over with.” But this is a lifelong process and experience as well. You may start at this company and continue with at a different one. Especially in Corporate America, where capitalism honestly depends on the system not fully acknowledging your humanity in order to make more money. So, you have to think about, what are small habits and rituals that can start to disrupt that, and have us move towards a more holistically human-centered approach to ourselves, so that we can apply that approach to other people as well. Peter: One of the things we didn’t quite get to is: let’s say UX Research, the profession that you are now in, should that be certified? Should you need a certification to practice UX research? Should there be unions to support UX researchers? Should there be these professional structures to address some of the things we’re talking about, because right now, UX researchers, literally anyone can call themselves that. Vivianne: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s in the form of certification. I don’t know if it’s in the form of committees, but I do definitely think there needs to be a level of accountability in the field. Less around accountability of personas and journey maps and jobs-to-be-done, and more of, like, do you know how to not cause harm to people when you’re with them? Jesse: Right. Yeah. Peter: Norms no longer work. Norms are done. Norms have just proven themselves too easy to exploit, and our practice, our industry is built on norms. And, how do we start turning norms into standards, into reasonable expectations, because of the influence, the power, that our work has. Vivianne: I agree. And I think that the voices that need to be leading that conversation or should be at least helping to shape what those norms are, should be folks who are underrepresented or marginalized. Because if you’re able to design well for marginalized, underrepresented voices in communities everyone else is going to benefit. So if there was new UX certification, and it was being led by a bunch of white men in UX, I’d be crushed. So, it’s understanding, too, does it look like for us to actually reflect the sentiment of being inclusive and human-centered, and even our approach to designing accountability, and especially now, I think if people were more aware of trauma, then you wouldn’t have people doing things like, I don’t know, scheduling user research interviews during election week. No one cares, why are people doing that? Peter: The information you’re going to get is not going to be… yeah, what are you going to do with that? Jesse: Believe me. I was doing a user research study in September of 2001. I know. Vivianne: Or even just what if, instead of paying people the typical way we pay participants, we pay them based on the level of emotional labor that we’re going to be expecting them to give to us in this time, what would it look like to reevaluate how we compensate? There’s a lot of room growth with that. I get a lot of DMs and messages from folks who just had never had the language for trauma, for compassion fatigue, for understanding the difference between stress and traumatic stress and how you treat them very differently. And, I’ve had folks who have left UX and they’re like, “Wow, if I knew those things, I think I would have been able to get help and, you know, maybe we had more of a sustainable career.” So, this is also about, you want to have a sustainable and long career in UX. We have to start having more conversations about this. Jesse: I’d love to, in our last couple of minutes, just hear a little bit about Humanity Centered because, I think you’re taking an interesting approach to how you’re structuring, getting this knowledge and these skills out into the world. Vivianne: Yeah, so Humanity Centered, so we’re a community of what I feel are some of the most supportive, growth-oriented minds in the UX field. And these folks are coming together because we want to learn how to lean into new conversations with openness and courage, and really how to transform the status quo of what it means to be human-centered in our work, our industry, and our professional lives, by doing more of personal work required to do our best professional work. So, the way that we’ve structured this is, oftentimes when it comes to conversations about creating equitable and inclusive experiences, or influencing power in the workplace, a lot of people tend to treat those conversations and that journey as a solo one. But in reality, this, we believe in our philosophy that growth is best experienced in a shared journey. We have a five-week course that’s taught live. And we also have people split into small groups. And that way, too, we give people time to meet with other people from different countries, different journeys in their UX experience, different companies. But we design those pods to make sure that people are getting the best experience possible from this community. So, we have people do self-assessments to better understand where they are and their confidence and ability to have conversations about, inclusive and equitable design with their colleagues to influence stakeholders, to have more human-centered conversations. And we’re grouping them together with other folks who are in not only similar places of their journey, but with folks that are going to help them grow in their goals that they want to achieve from being a part of this community and course. So, in this, during the modules, we talked about things like barriers and resistances to cultural humility and competencies. We get super practical when it comes to, What does it mean to be ethical? Not even from a team standpoint, from an organizational standpoint. And we start to question current conversations in the field, like, Should we be focused more on not causing harm or focus more on causing more good? And what is that mindset shift? How does that influence the way we approach product UX? So we had our first cohort that wrapped up actually on Sunday. We’re having our second cohort start, end of January. We’ve been really excited to have some amazing corporate partners, and sponsors to help us with this work. And for us, any partnership and corporate sponsorship money we receive, we put it back in a hundred percent into scholarships. We are convicted about the importance of having the most diverse and inclusive community within UX, and it’s been a really hot, awesome, awesome experience. We have folks, obviously, from the States, from Canada, we have folks from Costa Rica, from Ireland, from Kenya. We have folks from all over. We have, one student who literally wakes up at 2:00 AM their time to join us. And so, we’re working on how to make it more accessible, more global as well. And it’s been, honestly, just like a gift in such a chaotic year. So that’s what we’re about. Peter: That’s awesome. Jesse: Wow. That sounds really great. Vivianne: Type in humanitycentered.com, whether that’s centered spelled from UK English, or American English, it will kick you to our website so you can learn more about the courses, learn more about the community and, I’ll see you there. Jesse: Thank you so much for being with us. Peter: This has definitely been, I’ll say mind opening, not even eye-opening, so thank you. Vivianne: Thank you. Jesse: And that concludes another episode of Finding Our Way. You can find Vivianne Castillo on LinkedIn, as well as on medium. She’s also on Twitter @vcastillo360. You can find Peter and myself on Twitter as well. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. Please feel free to yell at us in public. We love it. If you prefer to yell at us in private, you can do that too. Using the feedback form on the website for this podcast, at http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find every episode and transcripts. We’ll see you next time.

Transcript Jen: Dysfunction in scrum teams or in product teams starts at the very beginning. It starts when people don’t agree on the problem that they’re solving, never mind the solution that’s being designed. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, And we’re Finding Our Way… Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show, veteran UX research leader, Jen Cardello of Fidelity Investments, joins us to talk about building teams, building relationships, building credibility, and building the case for human centered practices. Jesse: Part of the reason why I was interested in talking with you is that, what we’ve heard and what we’ve seen, is that there are a wide variety of answers to the question of where research should sit within an organization. And we’ve heard from folks about research being more strongly aligned with product research, being more strongly aligned with the business side of things, research being, in some cases. completely separate from a design group and almost like a peer or a service to a design group. And so I’m curious about all of these different approaches, what you’ve seen work and what you’ve seen has created challenges, in terms of just simply from an organizational perspective, where does research belong, and the different answers to that question? Jen: Those are great questions. I guess it depends on the maturity of the organization and what outcomes it’s looking for. So, if you’re looking for research mainly to provide proof points to shore up a design group that might have a little bit of credibility issue that it’s trying to build, oftentimes you see those UX researchers living in design because they’re trying to structure an ecosystem of tests that generate evidence, that helps the designers stand behind the cases they’re trying to make, for the change they’re trying to see in the product and the experiences. That can be really uncomfortable because it becomes very apparent very quickly to the product organization, maybe the engineers, maybe leadership, that those researchers, they may be working as hard as they can not to have bias, but purely by the way their function has been put in the organization, it becomes clear what’s happening there. So, In the organization I’m in now, research, all forms of research— which includes my partners in market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty—we sit outside of marketing and outside of design. And that is to ensure that those research techniques and our work isn’t weaponized by those organizations. That’s the intent at least. Peter: So, this is a trend I’ve been seeing, increasingly, for research to be its own group. What I would call a kind of 360-degree group, that incorporates market research, user research, I think you said analytics or data science. Some teams have, customer service and support, or a connection there at least. I like the idea that you don’t want research to be weaponized by whatever group that it’s part of. And I’m a fan of holism. And so having one research group that has all these different modes of inquiry, methodology, interrogation, makes a lot of sense to me. But how do you avoid, then, research being seen as simply an internal consulting practice that’s not invested in the day-to-day warp and weft of these teams that are trying to deliver new value? Jen: Yeah, so that’s part of the alignment strategy. We address that with the org design of the research organization. So I have those four peers, market research, behavioral economics, brand and advertising research, customer loyalty. My group is the largest of those and it spreads out over four business units. We use Spotify-esque language at Fidelity, to talk about the way we’re organized, from an agile perspective. So we have, at the lowest atomic level, I guess, of organization would be the squad. A group of squads is a tribe, a group of tribes is a domain and a business unit has multiple domains. And what we’ve tried to do is align our research pods, which would be like three or four researchers focused against a domain and a domain could be something as big as, wealth management, or it could be digitization of service. It could be financial wellness. So these are big themes. And we’ll have a small group of researchers working on that theme in that domain. And that domain might have 50, 60 squads. We’re not embedded at the squad level, there’s not enough of us to do that. We have about a 15 to one ratio of squads to researchers, but that allows us to float at a higher altitude to see where there’s things that we might need to really understand about financial wellness from a right problem-right solution-done right aspect, which is the other piece of it. How do we classify the type of work we’re doing for the teams? We do have specialization, I guess. So it would be aligned to themes of the business and how they think about bringing themselves and representing themselves into the market. Jesse: It sounds like you have a degree of control over your own research agenda, independent of what the teams are asking of you. It’s one of the things that you see in these organizations where there is this high level of specialization across the teams, is that any issue that doesn’t clearly fall into one of your tiny buckets doesn’t get addressed, But it sounds like you have some latitude to do some more overarching research work that touches a broader range of the experience that your customers are having. Jen: Yeah, that is true. There’s a balance between proactive and reactive work. In my dream situation, about 80% of the work we’re doing is proactive. It’s work that we have discovered a need to be done because we’re interacting with the business leaders and product owners and the tribe leads, and figuring out what their big initiatives are that they’re going after so that we can lock arms with them and seeing them through right problem, right solution and done right. So it’s this holistic relationship of getting them from that fuzzy state of not knowing where to go and what to focus on and what unmet needs are there, and then starting to ideate and test out solutions and then to fine tune that design. So we’d like to see 80% of our work surfaced and commissioned in that sense. And then 20% of our capacity is supposed to be reserved for reactive work because you can’t push that away. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be a team that says, “We need to present something. We actually need to get it in front of users.” You know, it’s more of a checkbox type of engagement. But, you know, researchers can get really depressed if a hundred percent of their life is checkbox engagements, because it doesn’t really feel genuine, that people really want us there. They’re having us there as a CYA. So yeah, the ideal is that 80/20 relationship. It’s not quite there yet, but we can very crisply identify what things we’re working on that are part of those big initiatives tied to the four business units. Jesse: Are you actively seeking out business sponsors for that work or, if it’s not originating from the teams, how do you make the case to be able to do the work? Jen: Yeah, so there’s some work that we are actually driving and saying, this is an initiative of insights gathering and harvesting that we think could feed many teams. And we think it’s important to do, versus there’s some big initiative that already has a business sponsor. And we’re saying, “Hey, we can help you guys. So why don’t we talk about how we might, I might be able to go, take you through an innovation swim lane or through transformation swim lane and show you what that would look like” and have them say, “Yeah, come on in, join the team.” So when we are suggesting things, for example, trying to lay out a landscape of insights by using Jobs theory, maybe even as specifically as outcome-driven-innovation, it is important for us to shop around and find the domains or business units and executives who say, “Yes, I do believe this is important and we should have some researchers working on that.” So we’ve been able to make a couple things happen that way, particularly when we’re talking about jobs and, we call it the Atlas, which is, basically, providing a landscape to look across from a segment and jobs perspective in order to plot insights that we know, and places where there’s white space, where we really don’t know, and we could do research in those areas. So the Atlas is a very meta thing. We had to go and get sponsorship to even do the research around creating the Atlas. Hopefully the Atlas itself will provide us with that mechanism to point to white space and say, “Hey leadership, wouldn’t it be great if we actually could turn that box green, because we knew things about that.” There may be opportunities living in there that we haven’t surfaced before. Peter: The map is the territory. When you’re saying “jobs,” I believe you’re referring to jobs-to-be-done jobs, and I know that…And it sounds like you’re continuing to have success with the Jobs-to-be-done framework. I’m probably going to misrepresent Jared Spool, but he’s been a bit of a jobs-to-be-done naysayer, not that he thinks there’s anything wrong with it, but he just thinks it’s old wine in new bottles. Nothing about jobs-to-be-done that hadn’t already been practiced by good user researchers in the past. I’m wondering what you’re seeing in terms of jobs-to-be-done as a framework, as interface and interpretation layer between the work of research and others, that has been particularly helpful. Jen: There are numerous reasons based on different company pathologies, where jobs has been helpful. Outcome-driven-innovation was useful at Athena because the product owners were really struggling to establish ownership over prioritization. They were very vulnerable to having their prioritization of feature functionality and value creation, being completely upended by leadership at any given moment. And so having something quantitative to point at, to identify where there were unmet needs, that presented opportunities for us to go after, gave them much stronger standing in and have that conviction about the prioritization they had picked. And it’s forged a very strong partnership between strategic design and product at Fidelity. Jesse: You’ve talked a bit about the use of quantitative methods as a way of forging these relationships and strengthening the case for the business value of various initiatives, but also of research itself. And I wonder where the qualitative fits into this. Tell me about the insights part of the equation and how’s that going in terms of making the case for people to listen to what you’re coming up with. Jen: Yes, absolutely. So there’s the framework that we use: Right problem, right solution,  done right. And right problem, we have this model, it doesn’t always get followed exactly, but it’s a model that we look to as a north star, and it’s a qual-quant-qual sandwich. And the qual in the beginning, the first phase of qual is really starting to understand where there may be openings of opportunity. People think something’s very important, but they’re not very satisfied with this thing. So we’re trying to flesh out a job map and areas of opportunity by doing that really deep high-quality qualitative work. We can create a job map, which would take us into a quantitative phase of running ODI or jobs-to-be-done work. So that instrument that’s generated is really well-informed and people have really listened and understood the stories of the people that we’re talking about. But that’s not the end. It’s not that you just get the data from jobs-to-be-done. And then all of a sudden, you know what you need to go build. It’s surfacing outcome statements, which essentially are unmet needs. And then we’re going to go back in and do more qual, because we want to understand the root cause behind those things bubbling up in the opportunity scores. We really want to get at, like, where is this thing broken? Where’s the friction? So that in Right Problem is very important that you have qual bookends. And then in Right Solution, we’ve been getting much more specific in how we utilize qual and quant, not just in UXR, but also with our market research partners to build a very strong approach to encouraging divergent thinking. Screening many ideas through quant, doing qualitative resonance testing, very thick data, high-value, qualitative interviews. And then once we’re narrowed down on some concepts, then doing market potential assessment, which is way more rigorous and way more quantitative. So, we’re increasing amount of rigor depending on the uncertainty and risk that we are facing, but we’re still having that healthy idea harvesting and idea generation that we need to see teams engaging in so that they have a higher likelihood of success. So we’re mixing qual and quant, and we’re also partnering very intensely with the other research disciplines to do that properly. Jesse: I’m curious about that relationship because that’s not really one that I had considered, the relationship that you might have with other research functions in the organization, which might have very different cultures of research and ways of thinking about how you tackle these kinds of problems, how’s that going in terms of the push and pull and striking a balance with your other research partners. I have worked with some market researchers that had a hard time understanding product research. Like they did not have mindset for it. And maybe the culture of your organization is different from that. Jen: It was new to me when I came to the organization because at previous places we didn’t have strong and developed mature market research practices. So building that relationship has been a great deal Of the effort. We’ve put a lot of effort into that understanding where there’s give and take, where there’s things that they can own entirely where things that UXR can own entirely. And where is it great for us to partner? one of our great achievements is saying like, we know how to get through right. Solution together. Yeah. It’s very exciting. but yeah, I have been learning so much about market research that I did not know. It was very enlightening to me and very humbling because I just didn’t understand, all of the techniques, like, you know, when people start talking about monadic concept tests and, Volume metrics. I was like, aha. You know, nodding my head and then, you know, quickly Googling things. It’s just intense, in large field with very specific techniques that have been, very well honed over the years. So It’s becoming more and more of a thing that UX researchers really should understand. And if you’re building a research org from scratch, you want market researchers on your team. The quantitative work alone is incredibly intense and valuable. But then also they have qualitative techniques and they have honed qualitative techniques that may be slightly different than the way we come at it in UXR. So I’ve been learning a lot and they’ve been learning a lot from us. The other really important partnership, though, has been the behavioral economics group, which–wow. That is like an absolute, superpower, being able to carve out experiments from a behavioral economics perspective to test certain hypotheses and experience strategies is just absolutely mind-boggling. I have been really impressed with that partnership and whenever we have the opportunity we’re embedding our UX researchers in those projects so that they can learn. Peter:  Did this research team exist as it is before you joined, and you joined to lead part of it, or did it assemble Avengers-style once you came on the scene and there was the right, I dunno, mix of leaders and functions? What was that insight in creating this independent research team?  Jen: So, prior to my arrival, UX Research had lived in UX Design and when the first business unit went through the agile transformation process, they moved it. They moved UX research into this research and insights organization. So, when I joined the UXR org had already lived for six months in that research and insights organization. Peter: Got it. Interesting. That’s possibly the only good thing to have ever come out of an agile transformation. Jen: it is, it really is. And beyond my four peer groups, we live in the data organization. So we live with analytics, with AI, with measurement. Usually when you’re thinking about, like, we need data around such and such, or I need metrics, the first thing you have to figure out is how to harvest that information, how to create a system to collect that data and then to analyze it. But more times than not that data already exists. It’s a matter of finding it and then packaging it up in the way that we need to. But because we live in that org, a superpower we have had to develop is to know what are all the types of data that we have, who are all the people that own it and manage it and play with it? How do we get access to it? So it’s definitely like a kid in a candy shop situation, when you don’t have to actually be creating all the instruments to collect the data, but you do have to get really good at networking and knowing all the players. Music break 1 Peter: So one of the challenges a lot of design leaders face, including a company I’m working with right now, is the reduction of design to that which can move measurement. “We’re going to do AB testing, and the best design is the one that succeeds based on whatever measurement we had decided was what we were going for.” And when that happens, when design gets reduced to moving needles, there is a qualitative, experiential component that gets lost, that I think we all recognize the value of, but it’s hard to measure. And, I’m wondering if this set-up, UXR within a data team with a lot of quantitative researchers, that happens to the qualitative research that you’re working on, because it’s looser, more nebulous, more amorphous, less easy to reduce. How you protect, you mentioned thick data, that richness of that thick data, in the possible onslaught of metrics and numbers that others are wielding? Jen: I’m working on a project right now that is an experience transformation project. And we’ve been partnered. We created a virtual squad between all the quants and the qual researchers. So that, we could approach building a holistic measurement strategy. And one of the things that we did was, we set timeframes around measurement of the metrics. Like when should we be able to measure this change? Because one of the things I think is very dangerous, is looking for those short-term gains like the needle moving, ‘cause I put something in the market two weeks ago. That’s really dangerous. And so building up that it’s a roadmap of measurement to see, like, we probably won’t see this needle move for another year, just to set expectations. So don’t ask me to be measuring that next month because we don’t expect it to move, but we do expect these things to happen. One of the interesting things that I’ve seen, this is Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion who teach product management, they had this really nice webinar where they talked about three levels of metrics and they had these traction metrics, which is, “I got the person to click on the thing.” They had product metrics, which is, like, something about adoption engagement, like actually using the thing to get something done. And then business metrics, which would be those way bigger needles to move, which are like satisfaction and NPS, operating income, new money, those types of things. And being able to really identify when should you see those things and how are they actually correlated as leading indicators of lagging outcomes? We spent, at least two months working on creating that model of how we should measure this transformation and experience. That’s the type of attention that we need to pay. And one of our partners is the AB testing team and they’re all in on that because they don’t want to be setting up these little itty-bitty AB tests that are supposed to be showing big change, and they’re basically not detecting any statistical difference. They want to be called in when it’s significant enough to make it worth their while to work on that. So we are building these measurement models and we are using very specific words. So just a couple of weeks ago I was correcting people. They were talking about a beta test and I said, “I don’t want to use the word test here. This isn’t a test.” What we’re trying to do is collect and harvest feedback that the creators of this experience can use to fine tune the design. This is not a test. This isn’t go/no-go. It’s not, it’s good, it’s bad. It’s actually a mechanism for generating useful, articulate, guidance that we can use to make this thing better. Jesse: I’m struck by what seems like the breadth of your mandate, which feels unusual to me, maybe not that unusual for an organization of your scale, but it still feels like it is more common for me to talk to research managers where research is really kind of boxed in to delivering a specific kind of data or insight back to the organization, and the organization is not really interested in hearing about anything that is outside that box that was whatever the box that was originally established for them. Or sometimes what happens is that a research organization will be established with a broad mandate and then that mandate will get whittled down over time to the most provable forms of research, and those are the only ones that the organization is willing to continue to fund. From the perspective of a research manager who is in that situation, how do I start trying to create some more space, to try some new things, to take some chances with what I’m doing with the research that push beyond those expectations that I’ve been boxed into. Jen: Well, there is some things that we do as researchers that are that basic kit of parts. Take evaluative research, for example, like someone shows up to you and says, “I want to usability test.” That’s great. That’s good work. That’s interesting. But there’s a point at which, in an organization, you’ve been doing usability tests for 20 years. Could we teach some other people to do that? And if we were able to give them that capability with that, help them learn faster and would that free up some of our capacity to do those other things, like to do more Right Problem and Right Solution work. And then could we get some of that Right Problem, Right Solution work and have some wins that we can show the organization, look, this is really interesting stuff on this team. We partnered with them on right problem. We were able to unsurface these opportunities and they were able to take that into co-creation and be hugely productive and put something in market. So you want to make space for your team so that they’re not on a hamster wheel. And you do that by multiplying their capability by giving some of it away. And then you want to find partners, either design leaders or product leaders, who are interested in that thick data and interested in that more intense collaborative, and you lock arms and you find opportunities to show some wins. So that’s basic playbook. And I know that every organization is different, so making that happen can be difficult in some organizations that may be very adamant about their perspective as research as a lobster tank or, you know, just a shared service that they get tests from. But like I said, that word “tests” is what sets you up down that path, too. So, choosing different vocabulary to display or explain the value you can have is even a little baby step, but shifting that vocabulary can help a great deal too. Peter: The lobster tanks suggests a certain New England frame of reference that perhaps you’re operating within. I’m also wondering if there’s something about the culture of the product or organization that you can attribute to the broader mandate that you’re realizing. What is it about Fidelity that has created this space, this opportunity for research to have this far broader than typical mandate. Jen: Well, this was an organization that was going through a transformation, and was fully invested in change. Like change is hard, but we have to go start setting down this path to do this. And so they already in that growth mindset and wanting to do things differently than they had done them in the past. So I’m lucky, my timing is lucky, right? Because I show up and they’re like, “We want change. Can you give us change?” And I’m like, well, if you shaped it like this, that’s dramatically different. It gets you insights versus tests versus just strictly validation. So how can we mold ourselves, create an organization that makes that happen? So they have an appetite for change, and they’re willing to be a little uncomfortable with that for awhile. So that helps. And then the other thing is, this organization is so obsessed with learning. We actually have learning days. Every Tuesday is a learning day. They’re really adamant about people building their T-shaped skillsets. And they’re adamant about career mobility as well. So when we propose the idea of research democratization, we didn’t have a bunch of people saying, “Uh, not my job. I don’t want to do that.” We had people queuing up. We had a backlog, we had a line, a waiting list that was months long for people to get into the program, to learn how to run evaluative studies on their own. And then the way we were able to frame that was by talking about a measurement called learning velocity that we invented, saying, how fast is your team able to learn? If you get in our backlog, you could be waiting a month before you get some insights from that little test you want it to run, but if you can do it yourself, you can do it in three days. And so the whole idea of like, ooh, more learning, more insights, this is a culture that is hungry for that all the time. And they’re hungry for growing their skill sets. So it’s, like, that perfect storm, but in a very positive way, Peter: Fidelity is a large mature private company, right? So you’re not dealing with the public markets. You’re not dealing with quarterly earnings. You’re not dealing with that hamster wheel that I think so many people face and which narrows or limits the focus, I think is probably a better way to think about it. Jen: Yeah, you end up with a lot of short, short-term focused initiatives that are looking for a fast hit oftentimes in public-held companies. In a privately held company, there is patience and persistence. So you think of investor mindset. We are the perfect company to talk about investor mindset. It’s basically how we’ve stayed in business for 75 years. That and exceptional customer service and relationships that we build with our customers. So we’re willing to make bets on things that may not bear fruit for a year, five years, 10 years. That’s okay with a private company. Peter: You’ve used, it’s almost a mantra, Right Problem, Right Solution, Done Right. Was this something that existed before you joined, is this something you helped generate? Is this something you used in the past? Jen: I brought it with me and, as I’ve mentioned, in other talks that I’ve given, it’s standing on the shoulders of giants because it’s inspired by double diamond and inspired by, “build the right thing, build the thing right,” in my work with the amazing team at Athena, too. But it was a really nice way for me to frame conversations with folks about what it was that was valuable to them and, how we, as researchers, could help them. And it had that effect of having people question whether they actually had a right problem that they were going after. So it started to, like, probe in the direction of teams starting to have that self-awareness they feel very adamant about having that right problem defined. So it is kind of like a rallying cry for people now. And it’s very common to hear product owners and other participants in the process who aren’t researchers talking about Right Problem, Right Solution, Done Right. Peter: You mentioned double diamond. if I understand it right, the Right Problem would be almost this diamond zero before double diamond. Is that fair or…? Jen: Yeah, I think that’s very fair. Yeah, I mean that right problem and diamond zero, it’s one of the most important aspects of ensuring team functionality. So, like, dysfunction in scrum teams or in product teams starts at the very beginning. It starts when people don’t agree on the problem that they’re solving, never mind the solution that’s being designed. And so you want to get really crisp, and be super articulate about that problem that we’re solving and who we’re solving for, and falling in love with that problem, because once the team moves into right solution, people feel super energized and capable, and they have agency for creating many solutions, which we know increases their likelihood of success when they put a product in market. Music break 2 Peter: Research, done right, doesn’t fit the shape of business. So if you’ve got these domains that you referred to, people don’t neatly fit in these domains. They are likely crossing domains. And I’m wondering how research works along those journeys, and doesn’t fall into silos of the domains, and if the Atlas is a means by which you don’t get stuck, or are able to realize the fullness and richness and messiness and weirdness of your customers’ lives. Jen: Yeah. That’s exactly what the purpose of the Atlas is. And the Atlas has two altitudes. So there’s jobs, which are really big things that are solution-agnostic, like “assess my financial situation” or, “help me transition to retirement.” Those are things that aren’t about the actions you’re taking in an environment. I’m not opening an account. I’m not, you know, transferring money, right? But those things are important, too. We call those tasks and we have an Atlas of those as well. And the reason that the Atlas will be useful for us there, is we do find that with those tasks, those are sometimes slivers of an entire journey. And you could have 20 teams all working on a version or a piece of that task. And we’re trying to reconcile that and make sure that where there’s research that might be happening in pockets of the organization that are all focused around that task, that we’re backing up a little bit, making everyone aware of each other. And saying like, “How can we do a body of research that serves all of you versus 20 discrete research studies?” And so awareness is part of the problem with that. And the Atlas helps us inventory, basically, who’s working on what, and it helps us address that patchy collection of research studies. So bespoke, discrete research studies are the foundation of your insights, and starting to build structure. So imagine a grid sitting over that, and you’ve got these little patchworks, we’re starting to say there’s places on the grid, there’s longitude and latitude, so that we can start to say, “What do we already know with the bespoke and discrete research studies now, how do we structure this going forward?” So it informs many squads and many tribes and many domains. It becomes a body of knowledge that is more universally useful versus being commissioned by one team for their purpose, and then never used by anyone else ever again. Jesse: It sounds like an information architecture job. Jen: It totally is like, yeah. I agree. You know, thinking about how to structure your insights. We all do it bottoms up, the first thing people do is they go into an org and they’re like, I’m going to build a repository. I’m going to dump all these things in and then I’m going to make it searchable. And I’m going to use AI and that’s going to fix everything. But we’re taking it from the wrong angle. Oftentimes that bottoms up collection of discrete research studies, they don’t click together. They are not cumulative. They don’t create a living dynamic body of knowledge because we haven’t structured it to do that at all. Jesse: Right. Well, as with any other Enterprise IA challenge, it often becomes a matter of divergent goals leading to divergent viewpoints, and those divergent viewpoints then becoming encoded in the structures by which everybody understands the strategy going forward. Jen: Yeah, it’s a balance. You have to figure out like, how do I structure this, so it’s somewhat agnostic to who we are and the way we deliver things now. So jobs is a way to think of that. Jesse: Hmm, it’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it this way before, but I can see through this lens, jobs-to-be-done as a tool for defining the information architecture of a product offering. Jen: Absolutely, It could be used for that. And the great thing about ODI in particular, not to be overly dogmatic, It’s not the only jobs theory. but I’m fond of it because it does have these two distinctions of core functional jobs. So it’s very high-level jobs and then consumption chain jobs, which we call tasks, but they could be other things. They could be journeys. There could be other types of experiences, but it gives you that leveling, so you can work at both ends of the spectrum. Jesse: You mentioned your partnerships with the market research folks and the behavioral economics folks as things that were really invigorating for you because they had expertise and methodologies that expanded your world. How would you like to see the work of UX research evolve and expand going forward? Jen: Hm, that’s a tough question. I would like UX researchers to gain some of those skills. But one of the things that we’ve talked about, you know, how in design land, we talked about the T-shape and, not necessarily creating generalists, but being able to cover more of the T-shape in knowledge of expanse of things you could know as a designer and a design specialist, and then getting deep in some of those areas, the way we’re talking about that, because we don’t live in Design is, do we have a T-shape for a researcher that spans across user experience research and market research and behavioral economics and loyalty and advertising and marketing? Do we start to create generalists in that vein? So, that’s one thing that I am particularly interested in, is building out skill sets of researchers so that they can learn more of techniques from those other research disciplines. I think that’s really important, because we’re not always going to be in a situation where there’s low risk and low uncertainty, and we can go talk to five people and then launch a product. And in many cases, if you’re at an existing company, you have lots of revenue at stake, and there’s a history, and many customers whose experiences could be upended by you making changes. And so we really do need to know a lot more about the rigor that goes into traditional research techniques. We can’t test everything in market. Which is also another area that I would love for UX researchers to understand. And I know at a lot of startups, they do understand A/B testing. But because we can’t test everything in market, how can we build better systems to set norms and predictions and understand correlation? So some of the skillsets I’d love to see are, more quant, more understanding of stats. Yeah, you don’t have to be a statistician, but know what people are talking about and understand when you should call the expert. I think that would be wonderful to see as far as maturity in the field. Peter: There’s been clearly parallels within design getting reduced to, at least in digital contexts, visual design and interaction design, and screens. And research has also been reduced by companies. There’s so much that it could be, but research has been thought of as interviews and maybe some analysis and we’ll call it a day. And I think what you’re pointing out is that this can be a field or an industry, a practice as varied and rich as design, as software engineering, as any number of other things. But the companies we work with tend to see research in a very limited mode. You talk about skills building, and you’re the lead of a team. You probably have research leaders within your organization.  And I’m wondering how you approach UX research leadership. And what are those skills that, as you’re looking at building the capabilities of the people on your team, what are skills that you’re paying attention to? And what are you focused on in terms of growing the leaders within your organization? Jen: So last year was a big growth year for us because we added that management layer in. Previous to that, UX research was more of a bunch of Lone Rangers out roaming the halls, finding squads to do work for, and we were building out the teams. So, looking for some leaders who had very specific qualities, but also things that might be a little bit more nuanced than just a skillset. So, what we work on is, first of all, that growth mindset of coming in and saying, “I’m going to learn things here. I don’t know all the answers yet. I’m probably going to be partnered with people that I’m going to learn a great deal from.” And then also having a multiplier mindset. it can be career limiting. She’d be very territorial about what work you should be doing and what work others should not touch because it’s yours. So we work in a very collaborative way and we encourage the democratization of research program. Ee encourage involvement with that, even if you’re not one of the instructors, you could be a buddy, you could be a coach. You can help with that program growing because it does have such huge dividends for us. And then, some of the other things are, being really well aware of how product management works. A lot of the books that I give my team to read are product management books, they’re not so much design books, although it’s kind of expected that they would understand the design process, but I do want them to understand what good solid product management looks like, because the product owners, the squad leads, and the tribe leads are the ones that most need them. So if we can help them see things in a way that’s helpful to get them to move forward with product initiatives and move their projects forward, then those are great friends that we want to have forever. So I want them to be able to speak their language. So that’s something that we focus on. And, that idea that I mentioned earlier, career mobility. They’re not just research leaders, they’re leaders, and they should be able to have mobility in the organization. So for example, one of my research leaders I brought in last year just went over to the design team. So she’s going to be working on Russ Wilson’s design team now, which is awesome. I love seeing when researchers and designers move across the organizations and also move over to product because there’s nothing better than a product owner who’s been in design or research. They’re excellent partners. So I wanna make sure that they understand that they have a personal brand. And so we’ve been talking about like, What are you known for? What do you want to be known for? What projects can we attach you to so that you can better illustrate that story? What’s your narrative? So working on that is very important to me because they’re not always gonna work for me. I might be working for them someday. they might move to a different role in Fidelity, but I want them to have a very strong identity, not just that they’re part of my team. Peter: So at fidelity, you’ve found yourself not only leading this research team, you’re connected to other researchers, people with deep experience, really rigorous experience. One of the challenges that I’ve seen with research is that it can vacillate between one of two poles. It’s either a little too informal, “Let’s just talk to a few users, call it a day.” Or what I’ve often seen is, people with PhDs in some form of psychology or, you know, ergonomics or whatever, who are like, “The only research that is acceptable is ones that are run by people with PhDs who understand all the highly detailed realities of doing research quote the right way, unquote.” And I’m wondering how you navigate that, where there’s this desire to get your product teams and others to be doing research, but there’s also professionals who know how to do it, quote unquote the right way, and what are the judgment calls there around the practice of research, and how to make sure the PhDs don’t get their knickers in a twist that someone’s talking to five people in some informal way, but how also not to get bogged down by rigorous research all the time. Jen: So we have something called learning agenda that we create with product owners, squad leads, tribe leads, that are trying to learn all the things. We come together as a team. UXR and market research and behavioral economics, if they’re involved, if they think they can help. And we create an integrated learning agenda, what do we want to learn? And then we talk about how could we learn those things with what techniques and who’s going to take what? And so you’ll actually see, we have these nice little plans of like phase one, phase two, phase three, they’re all still sitting in Right Problem. But it’s like, who’s taking what? And then how are we orchestrating the readouts so that we’re either doing them together or they’re in an order of operations that tells the story appropriately? And that’s where we get into the quant qual quant qual type of pattern or cadence. So we do that together with them. if you’re in a very quantitatively driven organization where there’s massive fear around risk and uncertainty, you need to partner with the quants. You’re not going to win a battle of my five users versus your 3000 balanced-sample study, backed by third-party research company. You want to actually take those things and say, “Which questions are each of these best at answering?” And what we find is that a lot of those really intense survey work surfaces, a lot more questions that we can get at very deeply with one-on-ones or IDI is as they would call them in market research so that we can do this nice dance of back and forth and use the techniques for what they were built for. Use the right tool, to get the effect that you’re looking for. So it’s definitely a partnership. I don’t think it’s one or the other. We can find a way through this together for sure. Jesse: Beautiful. Peter: Yeah, I’m imagining you as Dorothy and everyone else is one of the animals skipping down the yellow brick road, linking arms. Jen: Thank you both so much. This is really fun. Jesse: Jen, thank you so much. And that wraps up another episode of finding our way. You can find Jen Cardello on the internet. She’s Jen Cardello on LinkedIn. She’s at @jencardello on Twitter. You can find this podcast on the internet as well. You can find past episodes and transcripts on our website@findingourway.design. There’s also a feedback form there. We love to get your feedback either through our website on LinkedIn or on Twitter. I’m @jjg. He’s @peterme. We’ll see you next time.

Transcript Denise: Feeling so full of what I was capable of, and so in love with what I was capable of that I thought, well, what else can I do? If I can accomplish this major thing, what other major things can I accomplish and can I give to the world of myself? And when I had that experience, I was like, that’s what I want to help people with. I want to help people feel like this. Peter:  I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Together: And we’re Finding our Way… Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.  Jesse: On today’s show, author and consultant, Denise Jacobs joins us to talk about maintaining a creative culture, how leaders can keep the creative spark alive in their own work, fighting imposter syndrome, banishing the inner critic, and a lot more. Peter: I have a question for you, Jesse. Jesse: Yes? Peter: Why did you invite Denise on our podcast? Denise: He said, “I have questions.” Jesse: I do have questions. I have questions for Denise. So, Denise Jacobs… actually, you’re going to do a better job of introducing yourself than I am. Denise Jacobs, who are you and what… Denise: Oh, you think so? Jesse: Do you do? I do. Why don’t you describe the areas that you work in. Denise: So my springboard area of expertise is creativity because I’ve been doing a lot of work on creativity since 2011 and, doing keynotes and workshops and whatnot on it, but then came out with my book, Banish Your Inner Critic in 2017, which was all around creativity. But the interesting thing is how some piece of work starts to put you into a new direction. And so now I’m focusing a lot, not just on creativity specifically, but more around how people can do better work through silencing that voice of self-doubt, so what you are able to accomplish and what you’re able to do, whether you’re at what I call the producer level, if you’re a UX designer or a developer, but then when you get kind of more to the managerial level, or even to the leadership level, how can you do what you do better through acknowledging that inner critic and having tools to be able to combat it so that you can actually show up more powerfully. Jesse: One thing that I love about the book, that you touched on a bit here, is that it does go broader than simply issues of creativity. Denise: Absolutely. Jesse: Although it definitely is through the lens of being a creative professional and has a lot to say about the specific tactics for creative professionals, the principles there are really, in a lot of ways, about self-actualization. Denise: That’s totally it. Definitely, I feel like the true goal of my work, and actually the reason I even started working around creativity in the first place, was to get to that place of self-actualization, because I had had this experience where I had this amazing creative flow state, and I felt so empowered and I felt so like, full of myself, in the respect of being full, like not needing anything else, you know, not needing the external validation, not needing somebody else to tell me it was okay, feeling so full of what I was capable of, and so in love with what I was capable of that I thought, “Well, what else can I do? If I can accomplish this major thing. What other major things can I accomplish? And can I give to the world of myself.” And when I had that experience, I was like, that’s what I want to help people with. I want to help people feel like this. And at the time, because what I needed was to reconcile myself and to come to terms and embrace and acknowledge and recognize my own creativity, the answer for me was creativity. But now that I’m along this path of a breadcrumb trail that led me to inner critic work it’s just like, “Oh, this applies to so much more than creativity.” And it affects people so profoundly, it’s such a universal affliction. Jesse: So our audience is design leaders, and a lot of these folks find themselves awarded responsibility in their organizations, because they were really good at the creative part of their job, they found a way to create for themselves that creative flow and that energization that you’re talking about. And then people looked at them said, “Wow, you’re doing so great at this. We should give you more responsibility so that you are now doing less of that. And you’re doing these other things instead.” Denise: ”You’re doing so great at this, that we’re going to make you do something completely different, that you have no idea how to do. And of course you’ll naturally be great at that because….” What? Jesse: People who were previously very confident in their jobs, find themselves in these new roles, and find that confidence has been taken out from underneath them because they’ve been cut off from the creative practices that connected them to that sense of power that you’re talking about. Denise: Absolutely. Jesse: So I wonder what thoughts you have on the challenges of keeping creativity alive in your work, when your work is no longer strictly creative work per se. Denise: Okay. So I actually have two things that I want to say. I’ll answer that question in a moment, but before I go into that, what I want to say is, that whole process that you just described is one of the key times that the inner critic becomes so loud for people, it becomes so prominent, and it’s become so in their face and forward. And that is exactly the work that I am focusing on now is helping people with their career confidence. Because it is in that transition that all of these mechanisms go into play that trigger the inner critic. Having said that, the interesting thing is that the same tools and the same practices that you use to silence your inner critic, to unblock creativity, are the same constellation of tools that you can use to counter that feeling. And in doing so get back to your creativity. Jesse: So, I’m an independent leadership coach now and one thing that I say to people is that leadership is a design problem. Denise: Preach it. Jesse: And, you’re working with different materials and often the materials that you’re working with are your relationships with other people. And it’s in relationships with other people often that this inner critic stuff gets kicked up for people. Denise: I actually just finished reading a great book that’s going to be coming out by a friend of mine his name is Mark Pitman. And his book is called The Surprising Gift of Doubt. And it is how uncertainty can help you become an exceptional leader. And one of the things that he talks about is the other problem with moving from a role where you were doing something really well, and it was creative and everything, to being a leader, is that you think that there’s a certain way to be a leader. And there’s not a lot of support, I think, about giving people the space to discover how they lead, and have the exploration and the journey that people have to go on to be able to discover all those things about what works for them. Like, if you’re not extroverted, then being a loud, extroverted leader is not going to work for you. And then you’re going to feel even more out of sorts, you’re going to have even more of an inner critic dogging you, et cetera. And so, it is this design problem. And then it’s also this journey of discovery, which a design problem basically is. Solving a design problem is a journey of discovery. But very few people contextualize it that way. Peter: Creativity is one of those funny words. Denise: It is a funny word. Peter: Just to make sure that we have a common understanding of what you mean by creativity: How do you define it? How should we be thinking of creativity? Denise: My main working definition of creativity is bringing something new into being. Peter: I think so often creativity is associated with things like the arts or writing and those types of practices, which are clearly creative practices. What is the connection you make, if any, between those expressive forms of creativity and the kind of creativity you’re encouraging through career confidence, through designing your own future? Denise: Because my background, as a front-end developer and somebody who used to teach HTML and CSS and work with software engineers, I’m always very careful to, very point blank, say that art and creativity are not the same thing. Making art is not the same as being creative. You can be creative in anything. You can be creative as a social organizer. You can be creative as a scientist. You could be creative as a CEO. Creativity basically is problem solving, whatever this problem is, however it needs to be solved. If you come up with a solution to a problem, you’re exercising creativity. So, when people are trying to cultivate their confidence, trying to step into a new position, expanding themselves, getting to self-actualization, all the things that we’ve been talking about previously, they are using creativity because, first of all, they are bringing something new into being, and second of all, they are problem-solving. You’ve got an issue. “I’m where I am now. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be in a different place. What do I need to do?” And then you go along the process of figuring out what you need to do and taking the steps for it. I truly believe that that is exercising creativity as well. Peter: Thinking about working with design leaders, I don’t have a formal coaching practice, but I work with design teams and design leaders as well. If I want to be encouraging creativity appropriately, for both them as individuals and maybe a team, what does that look like? How do we know that they are hitting enough creative cylinders? How do I look at something and go, That is appropriately creative! Denise: That is actually an outstanding question. And I will give you an answer that probably is not substantive for you. It’s not based on metrics or anything like that, because, I feel like first of all, when you start to get into, How creative is it on the spectrum? Is it zero? Does it go to 11? Then you start getting into this judgment about creativity, and then that will set up a whole other thing that’ll trigger your inner critic. “I’m not creative enough.” As a matter of fact, one of ways that I got to some of these forms of the inner critic that I talk about in the book, are from this exercise that I’ve done at conferences, workshops, where one of the things that people said very frequently is, “I’m not creative enough.” What does that even mean? If you’re creative at all, like you’re winning, right? If you’re doing anything you’re winning. So I feel like then trying to quantify it like that is dangerous and that it needs to be more of a qualitative analysis where it is, How do you feel when you’re in this process? Does it feel good or does it not feel good? I would say that, because it feels good, then that means that you’re being quote, more creative. And I think when you’re working with teams at the end of the day, what they create is important. But the experience of working together and everything, is going to have more longevity and more importance to the functioning of the team than the actual thing that they produced. And the dynamic within the team will also affect the quality of what they produce. So if they’re having a good experience, if they’re connecting with each other, that will be something that they can all feel and experience. And when that’s not there, they will also be able to recognize its absence. Peter:  Calling me out on my desire to reduce or, quantize things that aren’t quantized… There’s a history of that Jesse’s and my conversations. I’ve done the same with the concept of trust, trust is one of those things that the moment you try to start defining it, you kind of lose the plot, right there. And I think that’s what you’re saying about creativity. If you try to put it in a box that you can look at and study it, then you’ve kind of lost the point of that energy, that flow, that forces that the creativity is providing. Jesse: It’s almost by definition, if you can capture it in a box, it’s not the thing you’re looking for. Denise: Right. And it’s also like, how do you know if you’re really in love? Because it feels good. Peter: No, no, no, no. You write long lists of pros and cons. Isn’t that it? And then you… Denise: You rate it on a scale of one to ten… Jesse: You weigh them all and you build your spreadsheet. Denise: Exactly. Does it feel good? If it feels good, then you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t, you know, you gotta leave. Peter: Okay. I know Jesse’s probably itching, but I got to follow this one up. Because one of the challenges that design leaders, design teams face within organizations is working often with peers–engineers, product managers, marketing folks–who are highly quantified. They want everything to be metric-ized, and they want everything to be A/B tested or somehow proven. And I’m wondering how you’ve been successful in bringing this force and energy into organizations that might not have been ready for it. Because their mindset had been so analytical, mechanistic. What have you done to make that kind of change? Denise: The interesting thing is, if I’m in an organization, it’s because they want something different than that, what they’re looking for is that ineffable quality or thing that they can’t put their finger on, or quantify or anything. They’re looking for the energy and the spark of creativity and flow and connection that they weren’t able to achieve through the more analytical means. Jesse: A lot of this comes back to creating and maintaining a culture of creativity for the design organization, and then being able to hold that boundary, and shelter that creative culture from whatever the larger culture is that people find themselves in. Denise: Yeah. Or to even, try to get the leaders on board so that they are instrumental allies and even champions of this culture. Jesse: Right. I think one of the challenges in creating that culture of creativity is having a culture of constructive critique rather than criticism. It’s something that a lot of design leaders find a hard time striking the right balance, creating enough support for creative exploration on their teams, so people can try new ideas and play around at the edges, while also being able to provide constructive feedback to teams that channels that work in a way that brings it to fruition. And in a lot of cases, I feel like our inner critics take their cues from the outer critics, the people around us and the culture of critique versus criticism in how creative work is handled. What are the tactics, for encouraging that balance? Denise: Yeah, I think our inner critics really are responding to outer critics, and our inner critics literally developed because of outer critics. Our inner critics developed as a psychological construct that came as a protective mechanism to help us deal with and potentially even try to subvert having any outside criticism come in. You know, you get those early on and you’re like, well, I don’t even know what I did, but I’m going to be super hypervigilant now to try to prevent something like that crap ever happening again. Very, very few people have ever been critiqued properly. Have never been given feedback in a way that is actually supportive or good or positive. And then we learn that, and then we think that’s how you do it. I actually had a manager at Microsoft, where… I go into my one-on-ones with my manager and he was like, “You were in that meeting, that should have like triggered your localization ear.” And I was like, “I literally don’t know what I’m supposed to be listening for. Can you tell me what it is I need to listen for?” And he was like, “You know, Microsoft is a sink or swim environment. So either you’re gonna sink or you’re gonna swim.” I was like, “Not helpful, manager.” When you go in to get feedback, structure the feedback as much as you can, so that you get what you need, and through doing that, you essentially train the person who’s giving you feedback, how to give you feedback. Like you’re gathering information for a friend and then you’re trying to find specific information as much as you can. Asking for this information in a certain way, this is not about their character or whether they’re good enough. I’m trying to give them information so that they can do their job better. Jesse: I really like this idea. I think it’s interesting from a couple of angles. One is that in critique situations, the person whose work is being critiqued, often adopts this very passive powerless stance in the meeting. And what you’re advocating is really for them to act like it’s your meeting, not their meeting, and take control of the process. And I think broadly for design leaders, as they are often engaging in processes that they have limited influence over, wherever you can find ways to take back control of your processes from people who don’t understand your needs, those are places where you can expand your leadership, and those are leverage points where you can get farther. Peter: Something I think I’m realizing as you talk about silencing that inner critic, if you can separate your sense of self-worth and your identity from the work you’re producing, you will, frankly, no longer feel the criticism because it’s not about you. So much of the challenge with this fear of criticism is it feels like it’s about you as a person, an entity, your identity, your worth in the world. And helping people create a bit of healthy distance between them and what they produce, and make it about that thing that you’re producing, and anyone can criticize that all they want—is that thing achieving the goal, is that thing, based on whatever rubric, working—but it’s not about, “Am I a better or worse person because I made that thing,” and one of the challenges I’ve had throughout my career is people get so caught up in their identity with respect to their work. It becomes a reflection of themselves. Denise: That’s been one of my own personal struggles, when I create something it’s like, “This is my baby. This is a piece of me,” and getting to the place where there is the ability to practice some of that distance. Jesse: I want to talk a little bit about the inner critic because it can be a bit of a slippery concept and it certainly can look very different for different people. Tell us a little bit about some of the different forms that this shapeshifter, the inner critic, might take, that people ought to be watching out for. Denise: I feel like the inner critic does show up in a lot of different ways. And a lot of times people will talk about imposter syndrome as its own thing. I personally believe that imposter syndrome is a form of the inner critic. Perfectionism is a form of the inner critic. Being highly self-critical is a form of the inner critic. Being afraid of being judged, comparing yourself to other people. Fear of failure and success can be a form of the inner critic, and procrastination/self-sabotage can also be a form of the inner critic. And those fears that we have, those fears of not being enough, or those fears of being found out, are these kind of deep fears of who we are afraid that we are, they kind of get in the way. And they keep us from being who we can be. Jesse: For leaders, I think there is this additional challenge of supporting their people in contending with their own inner critics. And what are some of the things that a design leader might want to watch out for among the folks on their team that indicate that somebody might be struggling with this and it might require the leader to step in and provide some support. Denise: A lot of times, I feel like in creative, collaborative environments, what happens is people tone themselves down. People silence themselves. There was a great article on 99U by Matt May, that refers to “ideacide.” And I love that term, the concept that you’re killing your ideas before they have the opportunity to come out and really see the light of day, and sprout and blossom. And maybe they are kind of non-starters, but you never know until you actually give them an opportunity to come out. And so often people will be in meetings… Talk to them one-on-one and they’re just like, “Well, I was thinking this,” and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s a great idea.” And then there’s the meeting where the perfect opportunity for the person to share that idea, and they don’t say anything and you’re practically kicking them underneath the table. Like, “Say the thing that we’ve talked about…!” “No, no, I don’t think, no.” And I feel like that happens so often with a lot of people that it’s become second nature. And what I think would be helpful for managers and people leaders is to recognize where that’s happening. And the other thing too, especially in light of Black Lives Matters movement and a lot of what’s going on, people of color, women, anybody in a disenfranchised group, is going to have a stronger inner critic because society literally makes them have a stronger inner critic. And so then that self-doubt is going to be even stronger. And so, if you’ve got women on your team, if you’ve got women of color on your team, if you’ve got people in the LGBTQ community, they may not have that strong sense of self. They’re not going to share their ideas. And, it’s also very common for white men, or men, to talk over these people, to discount their ideas to start. So this is kind of a hot mess. I think that’s the technical term. Jesse: Well, definitely in my own coaching work, I’ve worked with number of women, and the challenges that they face, in particular of feeling like they have to adopt masculine communication styles in order to be heard, it really ends up driving them into this deep place of self-doubt about their own instincts. They stop trusting themselves.  I want to get your take on introverts though, because this is a topic that’s come up previously on the show. And my hunch is that many, maybe most, people who self-identify as introverts are actually hostages of their inner critics, who have developed a robust case of Stockholm Syndrome and have fully internalized that sense of being trapped into their own identity. Denise: Hmm. So, I found this tweet not too long ago that was pretty profound and insightful. And it was more about imposter syndrome, but I can see this having a direct correlation with introversion as well. And it said, “I wonder if what’s called imposter syndrome is just a way to rationalize how women and people of color have been treated all of this time.” Oh my God. Like, just amazing, right? And I feel like that could totally be true, too, of introverts. That there is this thing that, you’ve been talked over so much. So here’s one that says, “Maybe you don’t have imposter syndrome. Maybe you’ve been treated like an imposter your entire career.” And then here’s the one that I was looking for. “Sometimes I wonder if imposter syndrome, originating from the 1978 concept imposter phenomenon, is just another example of making racism and sexism and professional spaces appear as a psychological myth rather than a structural reality of how people get poorly treated.” Jesse: That’s great. Denise: It’s amazing, right? Jesse: Whose words are those? Denise: Tamara K. Nopper. Jesse: Alright, thank you, Tamara. Denise: Again, it’s like you said, this internalization of, “I think differently, I like to think before I talk, not think as I’m talking, and I actually want to find out what’s going on before I weigh in on something.” And then it’s like, “Oh, that makes me an introvert.” Yeah, or you just haven’t had the setup and the structure for you to be able to be. Introversion is definitely a spectrum. I like to say that I’m like 60, 40, or 40, 60, depending on the day. I would say that I’m an ambivert. But, you know, when I’m really tired and everything, everybody out of the pool. And I just want like a cup of tea and a book and like a cat on my lap, like out, I don’t want to talk to anybody. I’ll turn the phone off. I’m like, “That’s it, it’s over, cancel Christmas.” So, what ends up happening is that if people were in an environments where they felt more comfortable, and they were given the space, that they would probably be super-talkative. They would probably be more like a typical extrovert, but they’re not given the space for it. And extroverts take up a lot of space. Peter: I’m reading the book Caste, that just came out, by Isabel Wilkerson. She hasn’t really addressed work contexts. It’s much more societal. However enlightened and sensitive we’re trying to be even within our offices, and as we’re embracing matters of diversity and inclusion as companies, and as individuals, I mean, Jesse and I, as white men, have talked about this on this show, how we’re trying to practice being better, more supportive, in these regards. In her book, she has this story of going to a conference in India, I believe, about caste, which is essentially a critical discussion. These are folks who are trying to do away with or understand it so as to repair their society. And afterwards, she approaches someone and asks them, “Are you in what would be considered the dominant caste?” and the woman that she says this to is aghast, because she’d been trying to be as woke and as sensitive to her standing as she could. And Isabel’s like, “Yeah, I could tell by the way you interacted with other people and they interacted with you that you were in a dominant caste and those other people were in a subordinate caste,” even though everyone was trying to be explicitly not caste based in this structure. And it just shows how deep it goes. And one can only imagine this is true in the workplaces we are part of, however, again, sensitive and D&I-oriented we’re trying to be. What approaches or strategies or tactics can be taken to allow as many voices in a room to be heard and, to be able to contribute? Denise: Another great quote that I saw, which I spoke about it in a conference that I spoke at, the Enterprise Experience conference, and it said something to the degree of, “Racism won’t end until white people stop looking at as an issue that they need to be sympathetic towards, and look at it as something that they need to solve.” And I was like, yes, exactly. White supremacy won’t die until white people see it as a white issue they need to solve rather than a black issue they need to empathize with. And I think that’s really true. Castes, racism, sexism, everything, it can’t be solved by the people who are the recipients of it. Or who were on the low end of it. It has to be solved by the people who put it in place. And I think the more people see these issues as, “Oh, this is something I have to do something about,” rather than, “Oh, I feel so bad.” You know, like, “Oh, I feel so bad about that. It’s so wrong that you have to experience that.” It’s like, “Yeah, it’s really wrong that you benefit from it all the time. That’s really sad too.” And that it becomes more like everybody working together to try to address this issue, rather than “good luck with that,” right? All of the awareness and everything has been so long overdue, but as a black woman,  has also been exhausting because it’s just dredged up so much. But, you know, at least, now if I say something, it’s not going to be people being like, “That’s not an issue. That’s not a problem. I don’t— Why are you so upset? Why are you so upset? Why are you so angry?” I’m, like, “I’m angry because this is some bullshit. That’s why I’m angry.” I’m angry because this is ridiculous and it should have gone away. It should have been, you know, I grew up in the seventies, like we were under a false sense of security that it was just going to keep getting better and better and better. And then like just crazy things just keep popping off. We really need to do this collectively. Like you think you benefit from this, but you don’t. All the things that have been an outcome of racism and white supremacy, okay, so great, you are able to buy a house more easily and all this stuff, but then you end up going and being in suburbs that are completely, homogenized and then you don’t get the culture. You think you’re safe, but you don’t feel safe when you go into other neighborhoods. But what if you could just be safe everywhere? What if you could just have everybody everywhere all the time didn’t have to be afraid? Like, I kinda think everybody would benefit from that. Other people don’t feel the same way, but, I’m biased. Jesse: I think we all are. Yeah. Denise, thank you so much for being with us. It’s been a wonderful conversation. Do you have anything to plug? Where can people find you on the internet? Denise: Yes, the interwebs. So you can find me at denisejacobs.com is my website. On Twitter and Instagram I’m @denisejacobs. On Facebook, you can follow me at denisejacobsdotcom all written out. On LinkedIn, I’m Denise R. Jacobs. And actually, I am going to be launching an online course on career confidence. It’s called Amplify You: Cultivating Career Competence. And so you can go to http://amplify-u.com and check that out. And then finally, I have several courses on LinkedIn Learning, and so you can go and look for me as an instructor on LinkedIn Learning and go and check out my Banish Your Inner Critic to Unleash Creativity course, the Creative Collaboration course, the Creativity for All: Hacking Creative Brain course. And then coming out, I think in December, is going to be the Business Case for Creativity to help leaders champion their cause for creating a creative culture in their organizations. Peter: Hmm. And there’s the book. Denise: Oh, right. And then there’s my book, Banish Your Inner Critic, which you can buy on amazon.com. I mean, you can also probably roll into most Barnes and Nobles and find it right when you enter the store in the bargain book section. I know, but still it’s in hardback and it’s wonderful. So you can get at a Barnes and Noble. If it’s not there, you can just ask for them to order it or you can order it on Amazon. Jesse: Wonderful. Thank you, Denise. This has been great. Jesse: And with that, this has been episode 21 of Finding Our Way. You can find the previous 20 episodes as well as this one, as well as probably some future episodes, too, that I don’t even know about on our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you’ll find audio and transcripts for every episode. Plus, there’s a way to send us feedback on our website. Please send us feedback. We love your feedback. You can use our website or you can just write to us on Twitter. I’m @jjg he’s @peterme, or you can find us on LinkedIn under our real names as well. We’ll see you next time.

Transcript Erika: Most of what operates under the label of “design” right now is styling business models. It’s not actually design because you’re not making meaningful choices. The choices have been made. They’re outside your purview and designers are chasing after it, coloring in the boxes. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Together: And we’re Finding Our Way… Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show, veteran design consultant Erika Hall of Mule Design Studio, author of the books Conversational Design, and Just Enough Research joins us to talk about whether designers are truly ready for that coveted seat at the table, how to build those crucial cross-functional relationships, and the relationship between design and capitalism. Jesse: So let’s jump in. Peter: You have recently said something that I want to hear more from you and hear Jesse’s take on what you’re saying. I believe the phrase is, “The business model is the new grid.”  What does that mean? Jesse: Well, that sounds great because I have no idea what that means. Erika: Oh, fantastic. So what that means is, the important design now is interactive digital design, however you want to construe that. And we’re still drawing from the graphic design models. We still think of like, What’s the platonic ideal of this? It’s like graphic design, but now it’s in a web page or on a screen or something. And, I think the whole field of design is working from this horseless carriage way of thinking about it. Yeah. Because the grid is not what constrains your work. It’s the underlying exchange of value. And I think when designers don’t realize this, they do all this talking about being human-centered and empathy, myah-myah-myah-myah-myah, and then they’re shocked, they’re shocked when their work is being used to exploit people or extract value or do some rent-seeking bullshit, like all these delivery companies that are vampires on local restaurants, and designers don’t have any tools to confront this situation because they are borrowing the practices of the kind of work that’s irrelevant. And so if you think about fundamentally, What does your design snap to? It snaps to the business model. And there’s no overcoming that. There’s no amount of empathizing with customers that will change that because ultimately your work will be deformed to, perverted to, constrained to that underlying exchange. Peter: All right. You know, we talk about design operating within constraints. The business model is the singular constraint through which everything gets molded, regardless of… Erika: Yeah. And the business model can be designed. And I think this is the most important work for designers, ‘cause designing business models is within the skill set of any good, like, designer. To really understand what everybody needs, how to reconcile and balance those needs, and how to create a system that creates a flow of value among all the different parties. It is not intellectually difficult, like getting an MBA is not an exercise in stretching your intellect. So, I think the mechanics of business a designer can understand, but when they think about business, they think, “Oh, I’ve got to prove the ROI of my work. I have to think about KPIs.” And they think about like, “How do I fit my sketches into something where the people in the C-suite will care about me?” As opposed to, “Wait a second. The people in the C-suite are fucking everything up. Chasing this weird exploiting growth engine, but I, as a designer could redesign the system and come up with something where you create a product, a service, an entity, whatever that actually adds value to the system and doesn’t extract it.” And people are happy to pay for things. Like, people pay for stuff all the time. People pay for things that are valuable, but price is a signal has been completely obliterated by the availability of capital to subsidize services and products and make them free. Like nobody knows what, say, an Uber ride costs, what a taxi ride should cost, because the pricing signal has been completely camouflaged by subsidies from investors. So that’s what I mean by the business model being the grid. Jesse: I’m hearing a couple of things in that statement. One is that designers need to understand business factors, the business variables, the business constraints that influence the success of their design work. And then secondarily, there’s an opportunity to do that design work or to do some system level work that resembles design at the level of the business model separate from what anybody might have considered to be their job as a designer in the past. Erika: Yes. And I think most of what operates under the label of “design” right now is styling business models. It’s not actually design because you’re not making meaningful choices. The choices have been made. They’re outside your purview and designers are chasing after it coloring in the boxes. Peter: I wholeheartedly agree. The challenge that I perceive, working with designers and design leaders, is how they get into that earlier framing conversation. Often design is not seen as a contributor to strategy or business direction.  Even when you have very smart, strategic people in design, they’re often painting within boxes that someone else has established. They might be doing so very intelligently and very systemically, but there’s still some barrier between wherever design lives and wherever those conversations are happening. What have you seen in terms of how design can, I don’t know, storm those gates get beyond the castle wall and influence that? What is the move to start having the conversations that you’re encouraging them to have? Erika: Well, it’s not easy to do that. I’m not saying like all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, I just realized. Hey CEO. I just realized that if we don’t fix the business model, everything else is jacked and my work is pointless.” That’s not going to happen. So I think it is going to be very similar to, you might recall, the early days of UX, and how there were some prominent UX consultancies that shifted the conversation. I think the same thing has to happen because it doesn’t make sense to have a strategic design agency in the same way anymore in terms of making artifacts, because that work has all been pulled in house. And that’s the other part of the conversation people haven’t been having, which is, pulling design in house fundamentally changes design. It changes the practice. You can assess your influence as a designer by thinking about what the limits of your freedom to ask questions are. Like, if you can walk in and say, “Why are we doing this as a business?” you have a lot of influence. If you’re not allowed to raise questions, then your design work is relatively more shallow. Jesse named two things. So the third thing that’s going on is that design being pulled in house has changed design because they’re no longer questioning from the outside. So to answer your question, Peter, what has to happen is the new design consultancies are actually more like management consultancies, but without the baggage of a McKinsey and without the willingness to solve any problem. So I think it’s probably similar to the work you’re doing now, where some designers who are very, say, seasoned, do lead by modeling a new kind of consulting and defining a new practice area because people inside cannot set the terms of the conversation, but people outside can push on that and articulate this and do some consciousness-raising. So I think just like UX started as something from the outside that pushed business, this again is going to be a new kind of consulting agency, and a new kind of thinking and talking and discourse that’s going to push on organizations and push on people within those organizations, because you can’t change it from the inside. And it’s particularly challenging because a lot of people are very successful doing that thing. So where’s the incentive for them to change? Peter: So are you stating, categorically, that a VP of design within some enterprise cannot make the kind of business model change that you’re articulating. and that instead that VP might be able to help bring in some type of external consultant, recognizing a problem is occurring and say, “Hey, why don’t we approach it from this way? Here’s a group that can help us,” but that VP themselves, you’re in the system, you just can’t unmake it. Erika: Yeah, that’s the case. There might be exceptions. The only exception I could see is if the organization were in crisis. We’ve seen this in our own work when we’ve been brought in from the outside and then something failing about the business provides an opportunity for them to change. But if the business is functioning, according to the metrics it set for itself, you can’t change that, because what a lot of organizations are doing is shareholder-centered design. And if the shareholders are happy, that’s the only metric that matters in a business, ultimately. And I think these are maybe be like hard truths, and I’m not saying you can’t do anything good or valuable. But I’m saying that you’re work as a designer is bounded and constrained by this. And you cannot transcend that. If you’re working for a good company with a good business model and you’re contributing into that, that’s great. But if you’re not, then I don’t care how much you go out there, and learn about people and empathize with people. That work is ultimately going to be used in support of that business model. And there’s nothing you can do about that from the inside. Jesse: I think that whether or not people see themselves as being capable of taking on that role has a lot to do with their roots as designers and the values that they internalized about value, about the value of their work, about the value of design. I have my own biases here because I don’t have a formal design education, but I’ve worked with many people who do, and I feel I’ve seen certain patterns in how they think about their work. I feel like I meet a lot of people who came out of formal design education with the idea that their job was to be the conduit for universal principles of design truth through their work. And their job was to go to school, absorb all these principles so fully that they could apply them in any context that they found themselves in. And their job was to show up and be the expert on grids and typography and all of those kinds of things. And so they never really thought of themselves as designers of systems or systems thinkers. But then if you do think of yourself in that way, then the question becomes, well, What are the boundaries of your practice? If my job is to be a systems thinker, trying to humanize the systems of the world, what’s off limits for me then? And what is within the bounds of designer outside the bounds of design? Because a lot of the strategic decisions that you’re talking about making, often, especially in a smaller company, you’ve got to go all the way up to the CEO before you have somebody who has that level of power, and designers have to be invited into those conversations, to Peter’s point, by product people, by business people. And some designers may need to reframe their understanding of themselves and their work in order to make this transition. Erika: Absolutely. yeah, and I think a lot of design schools need to change. None of us here were educated as quote unquote designers, right? Peter: Journalism, anthropology, and you’re philosophy… Erika: Philosophy Peter: …what, philosophy? So, you just like to ask questions. Erika: Yes, I do. And teach people how to ask questions because nobody is incentivized to ask annoying questions. Jesse: I want to ask about asking annoying questions, because Peter touched on the idea that people outside an organization have more latitude to ask questions than those inside because of the constraints of the power structure and power dynamics. To what extent do you feel it is the role of design across all contexts to be questioning the fundamentals of whatever the business context is that they’ve found themselves in? Erika: I think that is central to the work. I think if you’re a designer, you’re a person who asks questions. I think you can be a craftsperson and not ask questions. You can be a stylist and not ask questions. You can be a maker and not ask questions, but I think if you’re a designer, that word implies a certain amount of power and influence. And the systems we’re talking about designing now are so complex that it’s very, very rare that the designer is an auteur in the way we used to think about it. Like our idea of a designer. Oh, a Paul Rand or… Peter: Dieter Rams or something. Erika: I just think the things we’re designing, ‘cause they are systems, they’re beyond any one person. So I think that being the person who frames the problem, being the person who asks questions, that is core to calling yourself a designer. Jesse: Problem framing, problem reframing, mean that any internal design leader necessarily takes up this, yeah, permanent antagonist role among the senior leaders of an organization, because they are the one who is there to question what everybody else is putting on the table. Erika: Yeah, but is a questioner necessarily an antagonist? Jesse: It’s very difficult not to be received as an antagonist as a questioner, I can say that from experience. Erika: The practice of design is creation and criticism in dialogue with one another. And I think we’ve emphasized creation and completely lost the sense of criticism, even though that’s fundamental, that’s one half of that dialectic. And I think it’s necessary to do the best work, to create positive change and people have to get comfortable with it and not think of it, like an antagonist. Peter: We’ve delegated criticism to AB testing or other forms of after-the-fact validation as opposed to the work itself. Because companies are willing to change based on metrics. But, the only criticism that happens internally is crits within a design org, but not say within that broader product development practice. So you talked about the role of design as being creation and criticism. And I also see the role of design as humanism, we’re bringing a humanistic lens into an environment, primarily dominated by business, whatever that means, metrics-driven thinking, data-driven thinking, or technologically minded thinking. And so, I don’t even know if it’s necessarily questioning so much as it is a new or a different mode of inquiry, different mode of framing. Business is a mode of inquiry, business, MBA-ish-ness is a mode of inquiry. There’s a mindset or perspective there, that have become dominant within these organizations, and I think what you’re arguing for, Erika, is design as an additional mode of framing and inquiry. I mean, we were making fun before we were recording of the social science stuff that you have on your bookshelf there, but it’s bringing with it potentially this whole social science and humanistic mode of understanding that has been, if not lost within organizations, it’s been relegated to a secondary or tertiary status within organizations with market research or other kinds of after-the-fact reactions to what is being done, but not before-the-fact, informers, of what is to be done. Erika: My primary issue with the field of design right now is that the discussion is so shallow.  I don’t get the sense that the field is particularly coherent because there is research and inquiry being done and it’s completely disconnected from practice. And the practice has been completely subsumed into, like, business and engineering. And then people talk about the wish for design to have a so-called place at the table, but they don’t mean that, so often. They don’t mean, “I want design to be engaging at this deep level.” What they mean is, “I want business and engineering to listen to my ideas and tell me I’m smart.” Jesse: Right. Erika: Right? Because the sad truth, the bummer about confronting what it means to be a designer in our current context, is that it doesn’t have individual ownership and you can’t show it in a portfolio. And I think a lot of people get into design because they really love and enjoy graphic design. I love and enjoy graphic design. But the part of the work that’s visible, that’s tangible, that’s a very unimportant part of the work at this point. I think the actual work of design is invisible and complicated and not appealing to a lot of people who came into the field to work on particular parts of the process. Music break Jesse: We had a product management person, Melissa Perri, on the show a couple of weeks ago. Erika: Oh yeah. I know her. I’ve been at conferences with her. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, we had a great conversation. And one of the things that she said, from her perspective as a product manager who lives in that world all the time, is that, and I’m going to paraphrase, and I hope I don’t mischaracterize what she said, basically she said that most of the designers that she’s worked with can’t be trusted with the kinds of decisions that you’re talking about, because they will torpedo your business in the name of serving humanity, and then don’t give a shit about the consequences. How accurate do you think that perception is? And if it’s not that accurate, what do designers need to do to change it? Erika: I want to meet the designer, like, powerful enough to torpedo a business. I the name of humanity. Jesse: Well, this is the reason given for why designers are not invited to the conversations that you’re talking about, is that they care too much about people. They aren’t going to look out for the needs of the business. They’re going to sink your boat. Erika: Yeah. I agree with that because, going back to the very start of our conversation, I want designers to understand that the business model is their grid. Yeah. I think designers are ignorant about business. Because it’s never been presented to them as part of their concern. That’s my whole point. And so, yeah. Designers will come in and because they’ve been led to understand that their work is only on the user side, they don’t understand that a healthy, functional, sustainable business is actually in the benefit to the customer because how often have we found a product or service that was amazing, great, and user-centered, and wasn’t financially sustainable. You know what happened? It goes away and something shitty and profitable comes in its place. And so what I would tell the designers is, if you are truly an advocate for humans, you will care about the business. Because only if user needs and business needs are truly deeply intertwined are you going to be serving humans. But designers feel like, “Oh, business is dirty” and fight it. And then they end up in service of its worst aims. Because they have the special, precious identity. So I absolutely agree… Peter: I see. Erika: …with Melissa on this. Peter: Yeah. most designers, without a lot of training or coaching and education, you wouldn’t want to just put them in those contexts or give them the authority to make those decisions. Erika: It’s not even a lot, the concepts are not complicated. The fundamental concepts of business, the business models themselves are not complicated. Business models are not hard. Conceptually. And then once you understand…. Jesse: Just look at all those MBAs who make them all the time, right? Peter: They’re geniuses! Erika: Yeah. So this is the book I’m working on. My next book explaining business models to designers. Peter: Are you sure you want to say this, because now you’re, beholden to it. Okay. Erika: I’m absolutely committed, because nobody is talking to designers. Inside of business, people are not talking to them at all, or “Oh, just give me the artifacts.” Or they keep hearing about the business value of design. Harvard Business Review has been writing… I don’t know if something changed in the publication, but in recent years, they’ve been writing some intelligent stuff about the relationship of customer experience and design and things to the business. So it’s not conceptually hard, but it is a huge reframing and revaluing. So, from the head, very simple. From the heart and from the identity, because I think as you said earlier, Peter, being tied to the artifacts, that is hard to let go of. The centrality of the artifact is still a part of a lot of designers’ core identity, and asking somebody to let go of the artifacts that they’ve invested their identity in, that is significant. That takes time. That’s not going to happen overnight or happen at all for some people, if your fundamental orientation is, “I make a certain set of choices and my expertise in guiding this set of choices is tied to my identity.” That’s hard. Peter: Speaking of identity though, I think there’s flip side of that in-house, which is, if designers start reading your book, they develop confidence around understanding business and business models. They start making connections between what they’re aware of and the business. They start figuring out, “Oh, here’s ways that the research that we’re doing could actually drive different ways of thinking about exchange of value.” You know, imagine a moderately complex service system. “We can shift value from one part of it to another and satisfy customers while lowering costs,” and designers start saying this, then you’re going to get a bunch of MBAs saying, “Who the fuck are you? That’s my job.” And those MBAs are going to be like, “Yeah, but did you go to Harvard? Have you worked at McKinsey? Are your spreadsheets going out to the eighth decimal point?” Jesse: They’regoing to Pat you on the head and say, that’s so cute. Please go back to your desk. Peter: For the listeners at home, Erika just showed a section of her book that read, “Put an MBA out of work.” But there’s going to be a challenge for the designer, as Jesse was just referring to, even if they are right, even if they are grounded, to develop that credibility so that they are not dismissed, so that they are not marginalized because in applying their background, their understanding, their humanistic design and experience-led understanding to, authentically, honestly, rigorously, intelligently shift the conversation around business, business value, business models, inflows and outflows, they are going to be running up against a different way of considering business, that is more mechanistic. That is less humanistic. Erika: More quantitative, all of that. Peter: More quantitative. All of that. I mean, not that the designer’s approach won’t have quantitative in it, but there’s, much bigger, values frameworks at play now. And, in most companies, those values frameworks are dominated by, uh, mechanistic mode. Research is an interesting contributor to this, user research, customer research, market research. How does this all get woven together in a way that these newer frameworks, newer foundations, newer perspectives in this conversation are understood and accepted as opposed to just push back and reject it. Erika: I have an answer for that because so much of my consulting work now is, How do we use evidence to influence decision making? And what you described is just a subcategory of that. ‘Cause I think the big blind spot that a lot of designers and researchers have is taking the tools of ethnography and turning them on the organization, ‘cause the organization is the social context of decision making. So it’s just humans in the same way that you understand humans outside the organization in order to sell products and services to them, or create products and services that fit into their lives and culture and match their mental model. You take the exact same process and turn it internally. So you go to that MBA. If you genuinely care about your customer, your user and you want to make their life easier, you don’t go to them and say, “Hey, stupid customer. I know better than you stop doing the stupid thing.” Yeah. That’s not how it works. You’re like, this customer already values this set of things, this set of context is meaningful to them. Let’s position our value prop in terms of what’s already meaningful to them. Exact same process, except building empathy among your coworkers is much harder cause people out in the world, you don’t have to deal with them on Zoom or whatever. I used to say, “You don’t run into them in the office kitchen.” So it’s actually much harder to build empathy among people within an organization, but this is incredibly valuable and completely within the skillset and purview of all designers. So what you do is you go to that MBA and you say, “Hey, I want to understand your mindset.” This is the questioning, and this is why questioning is not antagonistic because you go to them in a genuine, from your heart, Dale Carnegie, making friends and influencing people, kind of way. And you sit down and you’re like, “I, as a designer, want to make you as the MBA business analyst, whatever, I want to make you feel more successful. And I need to understand your job, ‘cause I feel like I don’t understand your work at all. And I want to understand your work. Tell me about your work. Tell me about your day. Tell me about it, how you see success. Tell me about your concerns and your anxieties.” And just by inquiring, just by setting aside your own agenda, just by openly asking questions like that, yeah, you are building rapport and you are building a bridge, and now you also know how to frame your work in terms that are meaningful to them. It’s exactly the process of user-centered design, but internally, and people don’t do this. And if you want your ideas to be listened to, to be taken seriously, you start by inquiry. And so now you can build a partnership and work with them to say, “Hey, I know you’re concerned about business success. I know you’re concerned about quarterly reporting, but whatever. And now, because I understand your world better, I can help bring our world closer in alignment,” or, “Hey, I have a view of customer value that’s meaningful to you.” And if you understand that person, and you’ve really asked questions, you know, to not all of a sudden do this brain dump of like, “Oh, but I know better than you.” And I’ve talked to designers and researchers who still have this idea about like, “Oh, I know better.” Then the stakeholders, the business leaders, like, we have a special kind of understanding the hardest thing for designers and researchers in this position is letting go of the idea that they’re better than the MBA. And that is a hard mind shift to be more effective in your own work. As a designer, you have to let go of the idea that you’re better or more special, and then you will be effective and you will have more influence because people inside the organization follow the same rules of relationship building and cognition and emotion-based decision making that people outside the organization do. Jesse: I think there are a couple of factors to making that transition for designers, that transition in mindset. Part of it is, to your earlier point, letting go of what can feel like the moral high ground as the stewards of humanism and humanity in the organization, the ones who were always there to remind people to do the right thing. Right.  And then the other part of it is letting go of the idea that your value comes from having all the right answers and embracing the idea that your value comes from having all the right questions. Erika: Yes. Oh, thank you. Yes. That was like a gift. Exactly. Music break 2 Jesse: So a lot of the folks who’ve listened to this show are in-house design leaders who manage teams of designers. And what we’ve heard from some of these folks is that they are able to establish these cultural values within their own design teams, but then when their folks go out and engage with their partners in other parts of the business, there’s this real culture conflict that comes up. It reminds me a little bit of the situation that I frequently found myself in at Adaptive Path where one thing that I insisted on is every designer presents their own work. Which meant that I sometimes was putting very junior designers in front of very senior stakeholders. And then I had to explain to the stakeholders why they needed to listen to my junior designer. And part of that was just getting them to understand that our junior designers are not like your junior designers in-house. They have a very different mindset and a very different skillset. But part of it, I think, is just opening the door to engaging with a different culture on the part of these stakeholders and the role of the design leader in this I feel is somehow to create that opening, create that space for a peer or business stakeholder or a partner to even consider what your designer has to say. And I’m curious about your experience, especially as a consultant, where you’re engaging, I mean, you’ve been a design consultant for many, many years now, and engaging with these organizations as an outsider. How does an in-house design leader build that credibility? Not just for themselves, but for their entire team, so that all of their partners across the business take all of their designers more seriously? Erika: It is harder. It’s a longer process coming from inside than outside because you have the mandate coming in from outside, you know, to come in and say, “Why do you do it like this?” And you won’t get fired. Inside, it’s the same, it’s one conversation at a time, it’s coming in with a very clear agenda, and this should be easier for designers because designers have the concept in their role of understanding other cultures. So you go to them and you say, we want to understand you better so that our work serves and supports you. And you focus on the rapport building, but you can’t come in with answers, you come in with questions, but the questions that feel that they come from a genuine place of interest and support, and that is so powerful. I do that simple exercise when I run workshops. And I’ve run a lot of, research workshops with in-house teams. And I just have them interview each other about your boring stupid job for 10 minutes. And it is so powerful. I have seen, like, all teams and organizations change after 20 minutes of, “Oh, we’re going to ask each other what you did at work,” which sounds too… everybody wants a named methodology, a technique, a silver bullet. It’s talking to people and more importantly, it’s listening to people, which sounds so boring and cheap and like it shouldn’t work, but the most powerful way to influence somebody is to not care about looking smart. This is every in-house, external, whatever. That’s every designer’s issue. I” have to prove how smart I am.” You have to set that aside and say, “No, I am genuinely going to value and listen to this person in front of me.” There is nothing more powerful than that. And that’s what will make you smarter. That’s what will make you more effective. Now coming to them and saying, “Oh, I’m going to prove something to you.” I turn down every engagement where somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, I want to work with you on this so that we can prove to the CEO how smart our team is, how accomplished, how much knowledge we have.” I’m like, that’s a losing proposition. You have to listen to them like really deeply and intentionally and, and, completely seriously listen to them and that’s powerful. And then you’ll know that at some point you can come back and demonstrate that you heard them, and it’s not like fake, active listening, surface bullshit. It’s really caring and really hearing. And if you do that, you can change people’s minds. You can change organizations. I’ve gone in and done it coming in from the outside. It’s possible from the inside. It’s not easy. It’s annoying. It’s not ego-supporting, but it works. Google did that big two-year Project Aristotle study or whatever. And they found out what makes teams go is psychological safety. You know this from your work at Adaptive Path, you know how much fear there is, how people are just afraid of letting their guard down in front of each other. And that’s what leads to bad work and bad working experiences, and people can’t critique and criticize each other’s work unless they have that trust. Which means, if you don’t really want good things for everybody you work with, then you can’t criticize them, and then shitty stuff is going to get out into the world, because nobody’s going to stop it. ‘Cause you don’t have that kind of relationship within your organization. Peter: You just talked about, how it’s easier to empathize with your customer than with your colleagues. What strikes me is, not what you’d expect, right? You’re working with these people, you’re collaborating with them. You’re trying to get stuff done with them. It should be easier to empathize with them, ‘cause you have a firmer understanding of their context. But I also know what you’re saying must be true because it comes up again and again, it’s become almost a cliche to say about designers, that they have way more empathy for their users than their colleagues. And I’m curious if you have a hypothesis or even data, evidence, as to why it’s easier to empathize with the person at the other end of your product or service than someone you’re collaborating with to make that product or service. Erika: Oh, yes. Oh yes. I have an answer because, often your interests are much more aligned with somebody out in the world because of the way organizations structurally put people in opposition to each other. And part of that is the framing of answers being more valuable than questions, individuals and teams within organizations are often in competition for whose idea wins. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes you have brainstorming meetings. I think people should never brainstorm ideas. People should only brainstorm and prioritize questions, because when you brainstorm ideas, you’re putting a team in competition with each other for who’s smartest. because of the way the organization incentivizes people or recognizes people or funds people. The way relationships are set up, so it’s not bananas that you would have a harder time empathizing with people, because a lot of times you’re next to each other, which means your differences are highlighted more, ‘cause the differences are tangible every day. Whereas the customer, right, the only part of their life that you intersect with is, like you said, the 15 minutes they use your product. The rest of the time the customer could do whatever, they could listen to music you hate, they could, like, like food you don’t like, but in an organization you’re up against each other all the time. Peter: Yeah, it’s a little bit like that Upton Sinclair quote. It doesn’t pay me to understand you, so I’m not going to learn about you because if I actually understand you, because of how things are structured, I might somehow lessen in the overall context of the organization, cause I might be enabling your success. And somehow our organization has set that up as a bit of a zero sum game. So, your success means my less success because you’re the one now getting the plaudits, the recognition, you get a promotion, et cetera. if I help you do that, at best I’ve remained flat, but at worst now I am secondary. I am a sub to you. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that makes a lot that’s sense. Well, we talked a lot about, cultures within corporations, within organizations. And one of the challenges that design leaders face is that, we’re all the product of decades of experiences that have acculturated us, and design leaders tend to have a different set of experiences than product management leaders and engineering leaders and marketing leaders. And so all these different cultures are expected, now with psychological safety, to collaborate. They don’t recognize just how different perspectives and starting points are of all these folks. And very little has done to try to ameliorate that or mitigate that. Erika: Yeah, it should be somebody’s paid job to essentially do interaction design on internal communication, but people act like that should just happen, and it won’t. Peter:  Thank you, Erika, for joining us. Jesse: Anything you want to plug while we’re here?  Erika: Yeah. If you want me to come in and help your team make better decisions or yell at any particular subset of people, that’s what I do. I’m a consultant. Peter: Excellent. Jesse: Thank you so much, Erika. Erika: Thank you. This has been fun. Jesse: You can find Erika’s company Mule Design Studio at http://muledesign.com. You can also find me and Peter on the internet. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on LinkedIn. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. You can find past episodes and transcripts for this podcast on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We’ll see you soon.

Transcript Billie: The conditions that are required for a more just world line up as the same conditions that are required for a more successful, more creative, more innovative technology team. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Both: And we’re finding our way… Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Peter: On today’s episode of Finding Our Way is my good friend, Billie Mandel. Billie has an illustrious career in design leadership, and team coaching and UX teaching. Billie: So I got my start in tech in the first dot-com boom. And like many of us, I started as a refugee from academia. I was working on a PhD in political science. I was studying political behavior and comparative politics. So I started my tech career along with 20 other people who doubled the size of Ask.com on one day. And at the time, the company had proof of concept as a search engine and suddenly corporations realized that they could pay us to make a custom that thing so that their users could ask a question on the internet and maybe not charge the company 50 bucks every time they called up. So I was hired to be what they were calling at that point, a content editor, and to lead a team of people the way we started. So UXC, but it was not UX. There were 20 of us who were hired on the same day to start building these things custom for enterprises. And, as things were back in the late nineties, within a year I had a team of 50. Peter: That you were in charge of. Jesse: Wow. I mean, talk about being thrown into the deep end of leadership. Had you ever led a team before? Billie: Had I ever led a team before? Well, the way you lead teams, when you’re  the resident assistant in a college dorm, and you’ve got your finance manager and your kitchen manager. But had I ever been trained as a manager? No, absolutely not. Peter: Did they provide any training or were they just like, no… Okay,yYou’re laughing. So, no… Billie: I mean… Peter: “You seem capable, here, just have more responsibility.” Billie: The thing about the first.com boom, there was the work that needed to get done and whatever you were interested in doing and capable of doing, you had the opportunity to do. Jesse: Was leadership something you raised your hand for? Billie: Yeah. Jesse: Why did you want it? Billie:  I’ve always gravitated towards people management, people, leadership, and maybe some of it has to do with being interested in the social sciences and believing that humans knowing themselves better and knowing each other better and being intentional about how we organize and what the rules are under which organize and what the agreements are we make. I’ve always believed that that creates the opportunity for human creativity and social change. And I found pretty early that the desire to see those connections and create those connections and help other people orient when they’re confused, and to give people guidance in combining their super powers rather than fighting it out, I think that’s something that I developed an aptitude for and an interest in pretty early on. Jesse: One thing that we hear a lot from design leaders is the challenge of staying close to the creative work as you move into leadership. That the responsibilities of leadership start to take over your time, your attention, your energy, and so forth until those kinds of creative decisions become something that you have to really fully delegate to other people, and you aren’t really having the level of creative influence that you had when you were a designer. But it sounds to me like at least through this phase of your career, you’ve been able to maintain some connection to the creative work, even as you were moving into more and more leadership responsibility. Billie: I definitely have stayed close to the work and the decisions that feel creative to me. In my coaching practice, I also hear a lot of leaders saying they’re struggling to stay close to the creative work, and, well, sometimes they mean I miss just sitting down and getting into the zone and figuring out if this is the top layer, what flows come next and what flows coming back, that obsessive fun interaction design zone that is enjoyable for a lot of folks, a lot of people miss that. I don’t necessarily miss that as much. What I’ve seen as most important in terms of staying close to the creative work is maintaining the ability to care and the ability to ask hard questions and engage without being attached to the outcome. So, I think that’s become one of my favorite things about being here. And an educator role is everybody brings me their creative problems that they’re solving. I get to engage and get my hands dirty and get my brain dirty. Understand what kind of problem are you trying to solve? How far have you gotten, where are your blind spots? My favorite thing to do is to help fill in people’s blind spots and get a more complete picture of the problem space that they’re working on. To me, that’s one of the most fun things we can do, is use our experience and our designer brain to help add and fill in blanks and create context for other creative professionals. Peter:  Atlassian was your most recent full time job, if I understand right. You were brought on in kind of a, maybe not unique role, but not yet widespread role  of design education, helping the design team do what they do better. But you’ve also mentioned teams and team building. And I think that was something you did at Atlassian. It’s funny, you mentioned your PhD or near PhD,  political science, and how do people work together to achieve, accomplish, and  come back around 25 years later, thinking about how people work together to achieve and accomplish. How do you approach teams and teaming? Billie: Ah, this is my favorite topic. This is my favorite, favorite, favorite topic. It’s so interesting because the job that I came to Atlassian to do was design education. And when I started getting in deep with the designers and the design teams and their cross-functional collaborators in engineering and in product management, one of the things that became so clear to me is that it wasn’t, How well do they use Sketch? How consistent is their design system? You know, Are they writing good code? Software teams aren’t limited because they don’t know how to code or they don’t know how to make wireframes. They’re limited because they are not as effective as they could be at combining their ideas and their proposals with each other.  This is my big Aha! In the past three, if not five years. If teams are struggling, it’s probably because of their teamwork more than it is about their craft skills. Peter: One of the insights I had at some point in my career was reflecting on my degree in anthropology, which felt, for the longest time, utterly disconnected to my work, and realizing, Oh, Oh, wait a moment. That actually, was a pillar in my foundation of what became my career, later doing user-centered design, human-centered design. I’m wondering what, if anything, from your academic development and understanding, have you brought forth? Billie: It’s amazing. Now at this point in my career, now that I, have really found my focus and the work that I want to do, the work that’s my work to do in this world feels like helping teams be more effective, helping teams hear all the voices of all the people on the teams and value them all equally and maybe have the most effective or the most valued idea not come from the person with the largest amount of bona fides in the room. And now I get to bring in everything from what I studied academically in political behavior, political sociology. These ways of understanding human behavior are super helpful in getting us to be a little bit more critical about what do we do at work, and why, I think, right now, one of the things that’s most exciting to me is seeing our industry start to take inclusion seriously for the first time. And one of the themes that I’m hearing more and more in the coaching work that I do, and in connecting with other folks who are doing more directly work in diversity and inclusion. One of the things that’s most exciting to me is seeing the conditions that are required for a more just world line up as the same conditions that are required for a more successful, more creative, more innovative technology team. That, to me is what I’m on fire about right now. What I’ve learned, is you’ve got a whole team of people and you need to hear all of them in order to make it worth everyone’s while. Wow. Amazing. Those are the same conditions that create improved inclusion. I think that gives us a big opportunity in this historical moment to make those connections. So, I’m excited. Jesse: So to my mind, that kind of stuff often comes back to culture and the tone that leaders set in their organizations for how voices get included and how decisions get made. And I’m curious what you’ve seen, some of the struggles, some of the successes, whether from your own practice,as a leader, or other leaders that you’ve worked with, in creating that sense of inclusion within teams. Billie: The most important thing that I’ve seen is that, just like our children, our employees and mentees will do what we do, not what we say. And the most common mistake that I see is leaders grandstanding about, “we want you to do this, and these are the values” and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla, from a perspective that’s facing outward and talking down and telling, but those same people, not walking the walk. Music break Peter:  So, I really want to be the woke leader, but I also know that I’m a middle-aged white dude, and I’m likely going to behave in not so great ways.  How does a legitimately, authentically desiring leader, who is demonstrating these behaviors unknowingly… Who’s calling them on it? How do we set up a context internally so that they can get some reflection and be called on it? Billie: Like any other life-sustaining habit, using your superpowers for good requires practice and requires a critical perspective. So, thing one, I’m going to say only leaders who choose to lead with vulnerability actively and regularly will be able to lead to real inclusion. And I absolutely believe that. And I don’t throw down “only”s and “never”s and “always” very often, but I absolutely believe that. I think you must have the ability and the willingness to look critically at your own behavior and to choose to be better. Probably the most important leadership and professional book that I have is Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck. And I reread it about once a year to see the ways in which my beliefs about my own inherent goodness, superiority, and talent are holding me back and causing me to probably be propping up systems that benefit me unfairly. So, I think every leader, particularly a leader who is from a majority group, you need a trusted dissenter. And that person needs to be somebody who will tell you when you’re full of shit, who is keeping an eye out for what you’re missing and who has a perspective that’s different from yours. It’s a thing you and I have done in our friendship together over the years, Peter, that I really appreciate. Peter: I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had those people in my life, professionally, who’ve been willing to call me out on my bullshit, and however defensive I am at the outset, I usually over time realize like, okay, yeah, they’re right, and I learned to take that in, but I think a lot of people don’t have that in their lives or they wouldn’t know how to find it. It’s not something you go to your HR business partner and say, “I need someone to call me out on my bullshit. Can you find me one of them?” Like, so any tips on how to develop that? Billie: Yes. I have a few ideas. So, I do believe that any leader who wants to create an environment of inclusion and who wants to be able to make use of the team creativity that you get by having that environment, you need to create an environment of regular productive critique, and you need to participate in it yourself. Jesse: What does that look like? Your participation. Does that mean offering your workup for critique or are you simply serving in the role as sort of arbiter Billie: Oh, no, it absolutely means that your stuff is on the line. So, to me, one of the most important questions a person on a team can ask their teammates is, “What am I missing?” So this idea that each person on a team has a perspective, and I call this the alchemy of teams. If the three of us are on a team and one plus one plus one, there are three of us. But if we’re all like, well, Jesse’s got that bright red hair. And so he’s going to be the leader because he is, he is forceful. So we’re all gonna follow him. We all do what he says. One plus one plus one is one. So we do what Jesse says, cause we want to impress him. And we essentially subtract the value that we could have added from the ultimate value the team creates. So the conditions that we want are one plus one plus one is more than three, when the three of us get together and combine our passion and our creative vision. We want the output of what we create together to be bigger and better than what any one of us had brought from the start. The conditions that you need in order to do that as a leader, you absolutely need to be willing to submit your own work and decisions, both to your peers and to your team, to get their perspective, and you absolutely have to do it from a place of honesty. It can’t just be like, “Hey, what do you think? All right, great. We’re going to do what I wanted in the first place.” As soon as you do that, you’ve demonstrated to your team that you actually don’t give a shit, so the way you would do that as a leader is, you’ve got some kind of critique practice and critique practice is my jam. It’s the thing that I do the most and that I’m working on a book and I will have more tools available for folks to use. Really, the best thing that you can do is, “Here’s what I’m working on. Here’s what my best thinking has produced. Here’s how far I’ve gotten. This is the part that I’m less than confident about.” One of the most counterintuitive, but I hear the most high value, parts of my method is, shine a light on the ugly part. When you’re showing your work to people to get their input. What most of us do is like what our kids do when they bring us a picture. “Do you like it?” Which is great when it’s your kid. But if you bring me something, I mean, Peter, you and I have a good friendship. If you bring me something. And you want to know what I think you don’t care if I like it. You want to hear what you’re missing. So what I encourage folks to do is to ask, “Here’s my best thinking, shine a light on the ugly part. This is what I’m concerned about, and what I’m afraid is going to happen. Help me make sure my butt’s not hanging out in this way. What am I missing?” And you’ll find, as you ask that of the people on your team, and your peers, you will start to find who are the folks who are really going to tell you what you’re missing in a way that helps you move it forward, but you’re right. You absolutely have to be willing to hear the answer. To me, most of the core of developing comfort with the answer has been in mindset. I’ve shown someone my work and it’s not landing. Why does that feel so crappy? Most of the answer there is because I was taught to believe that if I’m not brilliant and talented, I’m nothing. So therefore if my work is not brilliant and talented at the get-go, how does that make me a value? Peter: The curse of the honors student. Billie: That’s exactly right. That’s why I love Mindset so much because it gives us the best possible framework for why these beliefs have served us. To be honest. I think one of the greatest illnesses in our industry is that while we all talk about fail fast, fail fast, fail this, fail the other. We collectively have no tolerance for failure. We collectively have very little tolerance for showing our mess. I would bet you money, go ahead into 10 design critiques across most companies in this industry. You’re not going to see sketches. You’re not going to see wireframes. You’re not going to see user journeys. You’re going to see pretty shiny high-fidelity things that people have gone off and spent a whole bunch of time making look the way they think you want it to look. And that’s a huge problem because all the opportunity for one plus one plus one is more than three comes from showing our mess and shining a light on to the part of the problem that requires the most brain power. So if I could wave my magic wand and give all the designers in our industry something, it would be understanding the value that you get from being vulnerable and being able to do the work that we really need to do in those vulnerable spaces to improve. But it means that we all have to be willing to improve and willing to start from a place of, It’s okay if our first cut doesn’t have all the answers because we need to figure out what the right questions are. Peter: You were talking about vulnerability, which I don’t dispute. Billie: Well, good, ‘cause we’d have to throw down. Peter: Well, there is a counterfactual. Billie: Okay. Gimme, I double dog dare you. Try and talk me out of vulnerability. Peter: Well, well, the counterfactual, I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but the counterfactual is the number of seemingly successful leaders who exhibit sociopathy or narcissism. And I’m wondering, how do I make sense of that. Of this demonstration of an almost lack of interest in others or an actual lack of interest in others, and yet an evident ability to engender success. I’ve worked at companies, I’ve worked at… Billie: I’m going to interrupt you, my dear. I think the variable there is your definition of success. Peter: Making lots of money. Billie: That’s the whole point. I think if it’s making lots of money for you, that’s your goal and you’re a sociopath heck yeah… Peter: Well. I would say growing a business, I’ve worked for sociopathic slash narcissistic leaders, who’ve been the CEOs of businesses, of some success. There’s clearly, I…. Billie: How are those companies doing on innovation or retention or inclusion? Peter: I don’t know, but I mean, I’m not one to, apply the DSM out of school, but you can look at wildly successful social media companies and the man-children who run them. And there’s a disconnect between that and what you’re talking about. 2.5 billion users is a measure of success. Billie: A current measure of success for some people. If you’re talking about longevity, if you’re talking about loyalty…    Peter: I’m not trying to be a devil’s advocate, ‘cause I actually don’t like devil’s advocacy, but there is a model of leadership that is anti-vulnerable. It seems that can succeed in certain contexts, and I want to unpack that. I don’t want to believe it. Billie: One could also say, and for the Jewish lady to say this during the Days of Awe, I’m going to throw down and I’m going to throw down hard. One could say for his business initiatives, Hitler was pretty fucking successful. The amount of power that was required to take that shit down. It was pretty intense. The level of execution that was possible with a machine like that. I know bad, bad metaphor. When you were talking before, it had me thinking about Hannah Arendt and the origins of totalitarianism. There’s a thing about the division of labor in a totalitarian system that looks a lot like the division of labor in a company that has a sociopathic narcissistic leader. I think if you look at the Banality of Evil, you read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and looking systemically at what makes large-scale atrocity possible. There’s a level of a division of labor and specialization that can be incredibly effective at a large scale level. Peter: Hmm. You basically compartmentalize the organization like you would compartmentalize emotions, Like in order to deal with this thing. Billie: That’s absolutely right. So there’s no one person that is making the decision to press the red button. Each person is responsible for a little bit of the decision that collectively adds up to atrocity. And frankly, I do think that what we see in a lot of massive multinational corporations smells a little bit too much like that for my own comfort. And I do see it showing up in our tech companies. You know, we’re talking about  massive scale of global atrocity, but even if you bring it back down to something more tangible on the daily, I think there’s a commodification of individual skill and then leaving big decisions up to the big brains, that can work pretty effectively to generate a lot of money, a lot of product, a lot of productivity. And I think it’s problematic because nobody is responsible for the ethics of what that totality puts out. Other than the people at the top, who keep their hands clean. If my hands are dirty as a leader, then I have skin in the game. I’m in it. I understand what the decisions mean. I’m sharing both the responsibility as well as the spoils. To me, if I’m designing a company that I still want to have exist in 50 years, if I’m designing for 150 years, if I’m designing for sustainability, if I’m designing for a different future, I don’t want everybody to have their hands clean, I want everybody to have their hands a little bit dirty. The way this shows up in design and in technology is designers or developers who don’t have their user flows, who don’t have their user journeys, who don’t understand why they’re just delivering the screens. They’re just delivering the ones and zeros. They can’t tell you how that piece fits into the other pieces, that holds them back in their craft. And it holds them back strategically, but that’s also what enables them to participate in things that don’t really feel right. And that’s what enables a company to bring in diverse people, but not really include them and have it never really feel right. I think we overvalue the visionary. I think we overvalue the person who can do everything on their own, and then we become dependent on that person. The company that I want to design, the future that I want to design for our industry, world, everybody’s contributing and everybody is sharing the accountability. I think it’s a different definition of success and a different measure that’s going to get us to different decisions about what we value and different decisions in what we spend our time on. Music break 2 Last one case in point here. Why the hell is it so damn hard, after 25, 30 years of doing this work, and everybody knows your first cut of what you think the problem is and why it matters, everybody knows, everybody knows that that’s not right. Everybody knows you’ve got to do some real discovery, and really understand your customers or end-users perspective before you put in money and effort into building your product. Everybody knows that. I have a graph you made, that I use to teach, it’s still the best possible visualization. Why you should figure out your options while it’s cheap to do that rather than expensive. But 30 years later, we’re still having the same effing conversation. And every design team in the world is still going, “They’re not giving us any time for discovery. They just tell us, make the thing and we’ll figure it out later. And we never come back to it.” Nine out of 10 teams out there are saying that. So they know they’re supposed to iterate. They’ve got their pictures of your iterative process and your one, two, three, four, five, and your arrows all day. Nine out of 10 of them don’t do it. Why? Because the definition of success and the, way we assess business value, hasn’t caught up to the way we need to be defining it for the future. I’m not opinionated about that. Guys, this is really fantastic. Jesse: I think… Peter: We’re just here to help you testify. Jesse: …when it comes to evaluating leaders and the impact of their choices and evaluating them against some success criteria, it’s often a question of your scope of reference, because we often see leaders who make choices that are right for their team, but wrong for the product; right for the product, but wrong for the organization; or right for the organization, but wrong for the users. Or maybe even right for the users, but still wrong for society. And so as you keep sort of scoping out, you start to see these wider and wider ripples of impact of the choices that the leader makes. And so I think your point is a good one, that where that sociopathy tends to take root is often in the organizations that are most myopic about the wider impacts of the choices that their leaders make. Billie: Yeah, I would agree with that. I would definitely agree with that. Peter: As you were talking about the totalitarianism and the kind of atomization of activity within an organization, I realized there’s a devil’s bargain as we think about teams and team building, which is we can create highly actualized teams,  and encourage them to behave in all the best ways. But that team is its own little unit and there’s dozens, if not hundreds, of them in some of these organizations and the risk is a hundred highly actualized successful teams, whose efforts when all added up lead to these societally problematic outcomes. Because we’ve broken up what each team is doing, they can feel super empowered, super positive about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, but there’s still something happening behind the curtain, where all of that effort that’s embraced with genuine idealism still can be shaped and manipulated. Ideally, it’s manipulated towards positive goals, but it’s most often manipulated towards this gestalt where the whole is so different from the sum of the parts that you don’t know, it becomes the Skynet or the monster that just gets unleashed, that even the creators, even the most senior folks, don’t realize what they’ve done, and in the worst of outcomes it can actually be steered or directed towards what we would consider nefarious ends.   How do we help folks understand that, to what Jesse was saying, those concentric circles out and out and out. Their role, however small, however seemingly focused, it’s tying into something ever larger. And, how do we provide  lenses or views that allow people to get that kind of powers of 10, like in the Charles and Ray Eames movie, so that you’re always looking at kind of multiple levels. Billie: Yeah. I always call that a funnel of abstraction, another concept that came from political science. If you’ve got the spirit of the law at the top, the letter of the law at the bottom, like the specific statute at the bottom, and the why and what social good it’s supposed to affect at the top, design problems or business problems work the same way, where you’ve got business strategy or the vision up at the top and all the way at the bottom is every specific detail decision that you would need to make. Most of us are going to have a part of that funnel of abstraction, where we’re most comfortable. We like looking at the system and understanding the why and the big vision. And if we only lived up there, we’d never get anything done. So the way we get things done is we come all the way down. What does that vision mean for what I’m going to do today? So when I’m teaching, particularly your junior to mids, they will, you know, they’ll start up here. Sure. And then they get down here and then it’s, “Oh, well, what’s your goal on this screen? When you click this, what happens if you don’t go all the way back up?” That’s how you ended up down the rabbit hole. I think it’s easier to teach your junior to mids, to come up than it is to teach your leaders to effectively come all the way down and back up again, to have people at all levels, interacting in the middle and helping each other specialize, but also stay informed the real contextual details. So this relates to what you were talking about before, in terms of leaders staying close to the creative work, so that the most effective leaders at a company like that are the ones when were able to, for example, come into a critique session, see the work that an individual designer has done, and if they’re too focused, be, like, “Alright, bring me up a level of abstraction.” It helped me understand what part of the problem have you broken out, and what are the decisions you’ve made, and which are the decisions that you need input on. The most effective leaders, even if they’re not the ones who are making those detail-level decisions, when they see what their teams have done, can help connect the dots to that big vision and help assess, “Do we make the right call? Do we make the best call or not? How would we be able to tell?” So the idea of being able to move up and down those levels of abstraction, and share context, is how you end up counteracting that tendency for everybody to be a little bit too far away. There were a few conversations that I think should be happening in every room where there is. Creative work being done, whether they’re physical or virtual rooms, certainly any kind of software design and development. This is another one of those things. It seems like it’s not brain surgery. Why is it that hard? But for some reason we still haven’t figured it out. Here’s what it looks like. Let’s just talk about the tradeoffs more. Why are we not talking about tradeoffs? Here’s what the end users need. Here’s what the technology can support now and what it would take to get it to doing another thing. Here’s what the business needs. There’s always going to be some tradeoff. Not that, What’s it going to cost us? What are the trade offs? In any business discussion, in any set of questions about what we should do and why, you’ve got the business, the customers are end users, and you’ve got the technology, and there’s always going to be a tradeoff between the three of them. And you want somebody who can effectively speak for each one, and you want to make a choice, and you want to figure out at what point will we assess, “Have we made the right choice? And when can we change our minds?” And I see too many leaders who assumed that that’s their domain and their domain only, and they’re doing their teams a disservice because at every level you need to be having those conversations. Even the junior designer, junior PM, and junior developer who are working on fulfilling the requirements for screen X, Y, or Z. Should it go in this order or this order? I don’t know. Usually what they end up doing is, Which one do you like better? Which one have you already done? Because they don’t have the information they needed in order to say, well, okay, let’s go up a couple levels of abstraction. What does the business need? What’s at stake? If we choose X over Y at every level, we need to empower our people to discuss risks and tradeoffs and benefits, and to be comfortable with their decision making. I don’t see enough decision-making at the junior to mid-level. So then I see people who are new leaders suddenly have no idea how to make decisions. And they’re guessing. You shouldn’t have to guess. People are covering for too much insecurity. When, if we got comfortable at every level, let’s talk about the trade offs. Let’s put our cards on the table. If we choose X, what are we not choosing? Jesse: This just highlights that as many things as have changed since you first joined Ask back in the late nineties with no leadership experience of any kind, and having it just put in your lap and being asked to sort it out, I think that that is still the case all these years later. That there are many, many design leaders who have not had the opportunity to really exercise the muscles they’re actually going to use as leaders before the role was given to them. Billie: I think you’re absolutely right. This also gets into why you hear so many leaders waxing philosophical about the days that they got to do the creative work, because they become people managers where they just have to give performance reviews. If we worked decision-making and peer leadership and modeling more into our junior to mid-levels, We wouldn’t have that much of a crisis of what leaders are supposed to do. Peter: Yeah, that’s interesting because we explicitly don’t give them authority, And I don’t think I thought about what is the progression of decision making ability that you want to encourage within people as they develop. I actually am working with a client and we have this fairly bright line between—and I’m responsible for it, so I might be guilty here—we’ve created this fairly bright line between a senior designer and a lead designer. And that bright line is one of leadership, is that ability to direct others, and there’s recognition that the senior designer is a very strong craftsperson, but doesn’t lead others. And then the leader has that ability to see beyond themselves, and affect the work of other people. Which feels like a quantum distinction, but what I think you’re saying is that it shouldn’t be. It’s almost not fair to say, “One day, you don’t get to make decisions. And then the next day you’re responsible,” without having provided some path to that. Billie: Absolutely. If you think about it, even the most junior designer is making decisions. You’ve got a design system and you’ve got a new design problem. Where do you apply an existing pattern and where do you choose to make something new? That’s a basic decision that even a junior has to figure out. Are we giving them the tools that they need in order to make the decisions that are within their remit? And are we giving them effective ways to you assess what decisions did you make? Are we giving them opportunities in critique to say, “All right. Here’s as far as I’ve gotten with my best thinking, here are the decisions that I’ve made. Does anybody have issues with these things? Am I missing something?” Training people to present the right thing and to ask the right questions. That’s why we have to model it ourselves. What I’m getting at is the definition of success. So if I want my juniors to still be working here in five years and to be leaders and to have knowledge that they’re able to disseminate, that is more valuable than somebody I would hire in off the street. How am I growing them? What am I giving them to indicate that their investment in me is as valuable as my investment in them? Another thing that I’ve,got for you. Just my back pocket, a practice that I have found helpful, I was thinking about the thing that you said about finding a trusted dissenter. A practice that I’ve started with some of the people I’ve developed a closest peer relationship with, the people I’m working with most often, is a cadence of “more of, less of,” So, a lightweight way to offer feedback to each other, like once a month, once a week, or whatever. “Hey, we’re working on this thing together. Can you think of anything that I could do more of, or less of in this next round of whatever to help our working relationship.” It’s lightweight enough that if you get into a practice of it, it’s kind of like Pilates. You’ll develop that comfort with discomfort muscle a little bit. Peter: I’ll take your word on anything having to do with Pilates. Jesse: Pilates is great Peter, you should try it sometime Peter: Sure. Jesse: And that wraps up another episode of finding our way. Thank you to Billie Mandel for joining us, you can find Billie on the internet at http://billiemandel.com. You can find me and Peter on the internet too. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg.  This podcast has a website, https://findingourway.design/. There you’ll find every episode, every transcript, ways to contact us. Please reach out, send us your feedback. We live and die by it. We’ll see you soon. Peter: Vulnerability and trusted dissenters… Jesse: Totalitarianism… Billie: Only you can get me talking about totalitarianism on a leadership podcast. I fucking love you people Peter: You know, you gotta, you gotta get past the surface layers of that onion. You gotta keep peeling it to get at the, at the, at the real stuff.

Transcript Melissa: So, how do you learn, how do you instill a product culture when even your leadership doesn’t know what that means? Intro Peter:  I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Together: And we’re Finding Our Way, Peter:  Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.   Jesse: On today’s show, despite some audio difficulties, product management consultant and educator Melissa Perri joins us to talk about the view of design from the product management side of the table, the true value that product managers bring to the process, and how designers can collaborate more effectively with their peers in product management. Peter: We’ve heard from many people and we’ve had our own experiences of challenges between product and UX. I’m curious what you’ve seen in relationships where product and UX, or product and design, are working well together. What is the agreement there? How do they divide up the work, divide up decision making is often a big issue. Who has the call to make certain decisions? What actually works for a healthy relationship between people in those roles? Melissa: You have to be partners. I’ve seen lot of bad archetypes and it comes down to being partners and seeing yourself as equals, the two halves of it. And the product managers, I try to explain, you are going to be working with designers super closely. There are certain activities we are going to divide and conquer. Either one of you could do it, but you have to come back and talk about it together. And then there’s certain other things like wireframing, where you should just let your designer do it ‘cause that’s their job, because you need to be going to do the roadmapping and yeah, and making sure that it’s technically feasible to do things, and making sure that we have the launch plan with marketing in place, and making sure that you’re presenting up to the executives, and getting buy-in for your stuff and then scoping it into the business case and figuring out the goals.  And, the designer could be part of that too, but you have a lot of work over here, and I see that where, where product and UX start to get tense, is because the product manager is trying to do all the design work and all the wireframing and the journey mapping and everything like that. And the designer is, “That’s literally my role.” And it’s because the product manager doesn’t understand that their role is actually all this other stuff that I just listed, not necessarily just the wireframes. Like the basics of wire frames. Yeah. Important. Just so you understand how users flow. It doesn’t mean that you should necessarily be the one doing that all the time. So I think there’s this discrepancy between, what should I be doing? versus what should I know how to do or be aware of? A good working relationship I’ve seen on a team level is when a product manager and a UX designer are working really closely through discovery. We plan our research together. We plan our personas together. We are developing these things as partners, right? Yeah. And then as we start to move into the solutioning phase, the designer is going to lead around really understanding what that’s going to manifest as screens or experiences, where the product manager, giving input from a business perspective to say, these are how we have to think about these solutions to meet our objectives, to make sure that we could still function as a business. But you’re also having that healthy tension where you’re like, let’s just make sure that we’re doing right by the user as well. So what can we do to solve users’ needs, that will move business goals, is always how I looked at it. Jesse: I feel like I have had a lot of experiences with product managers who did not themselves have a clear idea of the value that they brought to the process. And, as a result, I find that I have a hard time articulating the value that product management brings to the process of creating products. Technology’s there to build the thing and design is there to shape the thing and research is there to understand the people who are going to use the thing. And when I get to PM, I start to have a lot of question marks about exactly why that person is at the table. Melissa: So as technology gets more and more complex, you’ve got a lot more parts of the company that you have to bring together to launch a successful product out there into the market. It’s not just about designing a great solution. How do I make sure that solution gets launched? Well, it targets the right people. It gets marketed. Well, all that information gets carried over to how do I make sure it’s priced well, how do I make sure that it’s still sustainable over time? And then how do I prioritize the order of those things, to account for things like that. The cost of delays, scoping, moving into new markets, unlocking the potential of the revenue. There’s all these different things that you could possibly do, but now you have to evaluate it from a perspective of, there’s money out there. How much money is there out there? Do we have the capacity to actually take that money? Because we understand the needs of that market, we can do it as a team, and we have a good plan on how we’re going to go out and discover that, and test it,  and actually get into it. So, it becomes a very business-focused role at the top. And sometimes design plays a critical role in manifesting those things. But that strategy of, Where do you want to go? And what does it actually take to build to get there? That’s where I see product really coming into play. And then the order, in the focus of how to do it.  When I come into companies to help with a product transformation or something, the biggest issue that I see is nobody’s focused. Everybody’s trying to solve 15,000 problems at once. I always do this thing when I come in. I talk to all the teams and I’m like, What are you working on? I start to map it out. I’m like, okay, let me write down everybody’s highest priority. And I’m like, Why are you working on it? And then I go up to the next level and I go up to the next level and go all the way to the top. And then you could see at the top will say, “This is the most important thing we can do.” And I’m like, “Cool, 10% of your people are working on that. Why? Right. Like why 10%?” Because all these things come up and nobody’s really forming that strategy of how do we tackle this market, enter this market, or just grow in general. In a disciplined way, placed with an intent. And I think what product does is bring intent into the process at every level, to keep everybody focused around what are the most important things, and product at the top looks very different than products on the team level. And I don’t think you need, I tell companies, too, I don’t think they need 7,000 product managers. I think a lot of people honestly have too many product managers in their companies and they need more designers. I would say that in a heartbeat. Peter: I’m laughing ‘cause we talked about this a couple of episodes ago and, I see this again and again: companies having too many product managers and they keep hiring more. And my sense is, product managers are a promise of possible new value. If you have a product manager, they can now help you create new value. And so if we have more product managers, there’s more opportunity for new value. I don’t know if that’s why, but I can’t understand this desire to just keep hiring product. Melissa: It’s not that. It’s agile, it’s scrum, that did it. Those companies are the ones that call me. They’re like, well, we have 2000 product managers and none of them have ever done product management before, so we need you to come train them. So, that’s, like, my email inbox literally every day. And I’m like, so why do you have 2000 product managers? First of all, what are you building that warrants having 2000 product managers? Because you are probably spinning up stuff in solutions that don’t, actually, aren’t a product. So they were a project and he put somebody on it like a project manager. You have to spin it up. And now they moved on to the next thing. So you’ve got like a hundred products just sitting there that nobody uses, or like two people use each one of them. And this happens, especially in the enterprise, all over the place. But what happened is, when scrum came out and everybody started adopting scrum, they all had teams. And scrum basically said, we need at least one product owner on every scrum team. So they said, okay, well we’ve got 10,000 developers, so, okay. Let’s divide that by five and seven. And that means we have to have that many product owners. But that doesn’t mean that you need somebody there just running every single user story you possibly think of. And most of the time they make those user stories up because that’s how they teach them in scrum. This product owner role, the way they teach it, too, is very not like the way that I teach people how to do product management. ‘Cause you become, like, a backlog jockey where you’re just, like, writing stuff and handing it out to teams and I’m like, that’s useless, that’s not a product manager to me. It has no value whatsoever in it.  How do we really pull a strategy together? Where we look at it from a business perspective, a customer perspective, and a technology perspective, make sure it all works and then break it down so that we prioritize it and then enable the team to go after it. And that’s where I think the value is on having a product where I’ve seen them bring value to the team. I think if you have a great product manager on your team, they’re critically thinking about every single aspect, they’re crazy systems thinkers. And if you are building, especially, a software product and a software company, product touches everything. It affects the way that you make money in your financials. It affects the way that you would market it. It affects the pricing and packaging, it affects the technology, it affects the design. It’s that piece that brings it all together.  And a lot of people in the other roles, or in functional silos where they’re not thinking about it holistically, Is this a thing that we can usher out, that’s going to be successful in every aspect, not just successful the way it solves user needs, but also the way it makes us money. Or the way that it’s technologically sound, where we can build on top of it for the future. And that’s where I see product managers thrive is when they do that job, not necessarily when they’re managing a backlog. Music break Jesse: I notice a parallel here between flavors of designers, where you have some designers who are going to be very deep in the concept development, the exploratory strategic kind of design work. And then you have other designers who are going to be very tactical and they’re going to be about crafting perfect artifacts and that kind of thing. And it sounds like there’s a similar continuum, or tension, in product management between this, it sounds like, a product strategy kind of a function versus, as you described it, the backlog jockey, which is, frankly, the flavor of product manager that I have more often been exposed to, which is really a requirements wrangler. and not someone who really brings a point of view. And I think that’s the thing that I’m trying to get at, is what is the perspective or the point of view that product management brings to that collaborative process. You talk about holism, and it’s great to have one person who is aware of all the different facets of a problem. How does the product manager bring that sense of holism to the entire team? Melissa: A lot of it’s in the communication. It’s also managing their expectations of the executives. Where I see a lot of people struggle is talking them through the choices that they have to make as well from a prioritization perspective at the top. They’re not aware of the trade-offs, and a good product manager presents that from a holistic perspective of, there’s trade-offs in pricing/packaging, there’s trade-offs in the way we market this, and trade offs in the way we design it, so they’re really taking that and speaking that language of the executives, or they’re bringing that perspective back to the teams to help them understand what needs to be done with the solution.  I see that flavor of design you’re talking about, that’s very strategic. Like, I’ve met them, I’ve worked with them, and they’ve been some of the best designers I’ve ever worked with my life. And I think those people are usually more on the strategy side things, working with the product managers. And that’s where that relationship really comes out to play. I think when you get into the solution side of it, that’s where I still think you need some oversight around the solution and figuring out how it manifests, or how it could affect other pieces. But, from the perspective of what do our products really look like, and how does it function as a system, into like the user’s interactions and stuff like that, I think that’s pretty much the designer’s job. That’s what they’re there for. And I encourage my product managers to just get out of some of that stuff and let the designer lead. They should be working with the developers. And you just want to make sure that it’s not going to adversely affect the business needs, or the requirements of other teams, or the dependencies that are around other parts of the organization. The purpose of the product manager, to me, is to help scope out and prioritize what we’re working on, with intent. And that’s the piece, the intent behind why we do things, because you could build 50,000 things if you wanted to, but what’s the right thing?  So discovering what’s the right thing to build is not necessarily a one-person job. I think it’s involving the team in it. And I think the product manager’s purpose is to be the person who can help steer that, and make sure that we’re all tracking towards it and helping represent that right thing back to the board and executives. So, I think the view that I see product managers bring in there is, How do we unlock business value by solving customer value? And that’s the bridge that I see them bring. Whereas designers I think can definitely be in tune with the business and I’ve seen a lot of them do that. I think they get very focused into the customer value piece and I don’t believe there is any business value without customer value, but it’s what are the layers and the levers that we can pull as a business to help them lock that customer value and make it profitable for us. The pushback I see from the product side against designers is they’re, like, well, they’re only focused on the customer value, but you know, we can’t run a business, we would have no jobs here, if we only looked at doing what’s best for the customer. You could have the best customer value in the world, but if you’re not pricing it or packaging it correctly, it could completely kill your company.  How do we take that customer value and package it into a solution that’s also desirable for our market and feasible and viable, bringing those things back together there. Peter: I appreciate your use of the word intent as what the product manager brings, as it connects to a definition of design, I think, that comes from Jared Spool and we used it in our book, Org Design for Design Orgs, which is that design is the rendering of intent. In the past I had thought lot of designers being responsible for the intent as well, but I kind of like this idea that someone’s responsible for the intent, and then design is, How do we take that intent and make it manifest in some way? And you’re locating the responsibility for intent with product management. As you were defining your ideal product management state, it reminded me of what I would consider almost more old school product. Like we’ve almost lost our way. It had been well understood 10, 15, 20 years ago, and then it’s gotten corrupted over time into these backlog jockeys and that kind of thing. The role that you’re talking about of product manager is fairly senior. It wouldn’t make sense to have someone with that pricing and packaging, and executive presence and vision, et cetera, et cetera, on a team of eight people, you know, paired with a designer and working with five engineers. That group can make a feature. They can’t really build a product.  And so what is the relationship between the product manager, that role as you’ve defined it, and the teams doing the work? Is there one product manager working with four teams, five teams, eight teams? Are there still product people on those teams, product owners, or do we not even need that? Is it more you just call them scrum masters, in terms of what you need for a JIRA jockey? You don’t pretend there’s a product person at that level.  Melissa: If you had asked me this maybe five years ago, my answer would have been, well, there needs to be a product manager on every team. Like, would have wholeheartedly said that. I think the issue is that there does need to be a product manager on many teams right now. And the reason is just the maturity of the way that we work together. I think if you have a mature team with software developers and designers who, given good direction and intent by a product manager, can then look at things and work together to scope out how work gets done and take the lead on it… don’t think you need a product manager.  What I think it really comes down to is the maturity of the team and the ability for the product manager to build context with the team and capacity for the team to understand that context and feel comfortable with it enough to make their own decisions. One of the top things that product owners on the team level have told me is that, “I don’t have time to work on the strategy because all I do every day is answer questions from the developers.” And if you are answering questions from the developers that often, it means that you failed at your job to build context about what you’re building with them, so now they have nothing to really go off of. So of course, they’re going to come back to somebody and be like, “What am I supposed to work on today?” Because you haven’t given them enough of a vision.  And that’s why I think companies gravitate towards having one product manager on every team, because now the team’s like, “What do I need to work on?” And the product managers were responsible for that, in the scrum terms, and then they just start putting lists on backlogs that are not scoped. There’s no boundaries around it.  Jesse: Yeah. I think that context-setting is really important because, to your point, a checklist is not a vision and, it can be easy, for I think the product manager especially, to get into this cycle of just feeling like your role is to be the one to keep answering those little detailed questions. But I notice that that context, I have found often, has been provided by design because design has described the various features in context with one another, in a holistic experience and experience vision that they’ve crafted and are delivering. And I think that I find that context a little bit harder to come by for myself when it is formulated less from an experiential point of view and more from a functional point of view, and in a lot of ways that mindset hasn’t really left us, in terms of the way that a lot of folks do their jobs. I wonder about where the experiential and the functional come together and how you see the role of a product leader versus the role of a design leader in the articulation of that context to help drive those day-to-day decisions. Melissa: Yeah, I agree.  I always approach it from an experience perspective. Like that’s just how I figure things out, inward to outward, first taking the point of the user. I’ve seen other people in product approach things from more of a financial perspective to see how the business model works. And I’ve seen people do it from a functional perspective of what are all the requirements in this market that’s needed, or from a market perspective. So part of this, I’m saying, is biased by the way that I think,  compared to the way the other product managers are thinking. But one of the pieces I see in that is, there is a functional requirement perspective from a product brain that you would bring in, where I’m going, “Okay, this market is characterized by these types of people and this is what the needs are and here’s our product over here, and here’s the gaps of the functionality that’s needed to solve those types of needs.” One of the things that we would do is, having one of our user researchers, super senior designer, very much in the discovery phase that you’re talking about, when companies were exploring their product strategy and figuring out where to go, should we do what she called deep insights with them, where she would go out and we’d break down your hypothesis together. And we provide the context and the direction around it, and she would go deep with the customers and come back with a synthesis of, here’s where the gaps really lie. And this is what’s not holding up. So, we’d partner on these two things, then, to go, “Okay, you’re discovering all these gaps. I’m thinking about the financial implications of going after one thing versus another thing, and how we prioritize those gaps.” And then once we get to a good point, we start to synthesize that and then deploy it to the team so that they can surface up what are the right solutions to actually solve those problems that we’ve now prioritized at the top.  Jesse: One thing that was always a part of our practices at Adaptive Path, and has been a part of how a lot of folks have done this work, has been to use prototyping in some form as a way of validating concepts before you get to a fully-baked product strategy. Before you get to that level, where you’re ready to hand something off to a team. I’m curious about whether that’s ever been a part of your process. And if so, how that has played out in that dynamic, how a vision gets created and held, in that partnership between product leadership and design leadership. Melissa: Yeah, a hundred percent. For instance, one team, we’d have a director of product. I think we had three product managers underneath there. And they reported up to a VP of Product in a big corporation with many product lines. The director of product and the VP of product we’re brainstorming, like, what can we do for our product line to introduce a new upsell or feature set? What’s the problem that we haven’t solved there’s actually a lot of money in? And the product director goes out, and research does a lot of market research first to understand if some of these potential ideas actually hold any water.  Okay, we’ve got some data saying they do. All right. Let’s bring in the design director. Both of these are now pairing together, and we were starting to say, what’s our customer research hypothesis? Are we going to go out there and talk to your existing customers or new customers to figure out if this hypothesis that we found in the market actually holds water? Go out and do our user research, right. Come back and say, there’s something here. Cool. Now we’ve got the beginning of business case, saying that if we solve this problem, there’s money here. There’s something that we can actually upsell. Now, how do we figure out what the solution is? To go say, I need a little bit of money to test this, from the executives. Now we gotta figure out how to solve it. And this is where the design director might grab some designers and say, “Okay, let’s prototype, let’s start iterating around solutions and testing them out there with customers. And the product director also got four other teams they’re working with overseeing, but they’re spending half their time making sure this business case is really coming to fruition, doing some more research, really helping this side, but they’re also enabling the team on the other side.  Peter: You’ve explained the process here for product development.  You’ve talked earlier about matters of scrum and agile. And I’m wondering if you ascribe to any common product development process, two week cycles, three week cycles, this, that, the other thing, ‘cause what you described, I don’t know if  I would say it’s waterfall, but you want to figure out what you’re doing before you do the next thing. And one of the challenges, I think, some UX types like myself have, is my desire to think before acting. Melissa: I feel like anytime somebody is like, “Oh, I need a week to think,” people go, “Oh this is waterfall.” And that’s just bullshit, honestly. I hate that concept because here’s what I see when people take scrum religiously. When I was leading a transformation at this company, we had 5,000 software developers and 350 product managers I was training who’ve never done it before. And they had adopted this really strict form of scrum. And they were like, well, we have three-times-a-year releases, and we do two-week sprints. And at the beginning, after the first release, we get a sprint zero, which is two weeks to figure out what we’re going to do for the next three months. I was like, “How can you shove all that into two weeks?” Like, you can’t do that. And they’re like, “Oh, this is the only time that we can’t be delivering.” And I was like, “That’s dumb.” It should just be an ebb and flow where we’ve got this time;  we don’t know what we should be doing. We have higher levels of uncertainty. Okay. Let’s go make that a little bit more certain. Now let’s go test, let’s iterate on it. And then when we feel high levels of uncertainty, now we can break that down into an iterative cycle to release it. And I think agile works really well if you have some level of certainty around the solution as the right vision or direction to go after. I think it’s all about shortening the cycles of how long these take, the mount of time that you should spend in the research phase should be proportional to the risk of what you’re actually building. So if you’re building an entire new business line, like, so you were doing the Apple iPhone, you think Steve jobs gave people two weeks to go, “You figure that out.” Like, no. Right.  Peter: It’s more like 10 years. Melissa: Right. So it’s not that they’re spending 10 years in a, “Ooh, let me just do some market research” mode and like check the numbers out there. They’re prototyping, they’re putting it out there and they’re making sure that it’s awesome before they go spend all their money launching it and doing all these big marketing campaigns.  And I think that’s what people don’t understand. There’s things that companies do internally that you will never know about. They want you to think that it’s magic because that’s their selling point, just observing something from the outside and being like, they just do big bang releases, that’s not how that happens.  Same thing for agile. You just watched people do scrum. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re successful.  Going back to, you were saying about, Where did product management go wrong? It came out of all these companies doing a big bang, agile transformation. And they took all these subject matter experts or project managers, and they said to them, “You’re now a product owner.” And they were like, “Oh, we don’t know what that means.” And, starting about six or seven years ago, that’s where a lot of my consulting came from. And when people now can look and say, “Oh, there’s no good product managers out there,” they’re looking at some of those places.  Never been trained. They have no product leaders to learn from. I’ve been in organizations with 2000 product managers and nobody, including senior leadership, has ever done that role before. So, how do you learn, how do you instill a product culture when even your leadership doesn’t know what that means? And that’s where we’re getting companies, I think, misunderstanding what product management is. There is no value in a backlog jockey. I think there’s value in bringing a partner to the team to help determine what the intent is, like we were saying, it’s just that, I think companies adopted these practices, thinking that it was a holistic, and some of these agile consultancies, honestly, sell it like the panacea of the world. They’re like, “Oh, just adopt scrum. That’s going to make everything great.” And you’re like, “No, that’s just one piece of it.” Like there’s so many other things that it takes to build great software. And you’re just looking at one piece of it and thinking it applies to everything. And that’s where I think we get into trouble with all this. Peter: You had a quote in your book that I love, which is, “I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and I have never seen it work well.” Music break Peter: Something your question leads to, was a question that we got a little while ago where, there’s this one design leader in particular, who’s like, “I’m working with product owners who don’t know their job. They’re just essentially order takers for someone else. And so now I, as the design leader, have to figure out why we have these requirements, ‘cause I want to build something that people will use.” And this design leader found herself having to fight this internal set of expectations in order to do what she thought was the right job. So I’m wondering, based on your experience, what have you seen that allows the conversation to change? How have you gotten companies to let go of this dogmatic view of scrum or agile in the way that you’ve been describing and embrace other approaches? In part for those who might be listening to this podcast, like things that they could try within their organizations to push back when they see that things are evidently not working out. But no one knows what else to do. Melissa: Especially if you’re on a team, a lot of people just feel powerless. They’re like, “I’ve got no pull here. I’ve got no sway. I’ve got no authority to do anything.” I say the best thing you could do is go ask people what they expect to happen from a metric standpoint when you released that, and then measure if it really did, because now you just started a conversation about it. Usually all it takes is that first question. What do we expect to happen when this launches? And then what timeframe like, do we expect 10,000 users to signup, do we expect to increase retention by 40%? And is that a six month thing or a two month thing? When you start having those conversations, leadership usually goes, “Oh, I never thought about that.” And then people will start asking those questions, which is great. So I think if anybody’s not managing towards those outcomes, just starting to ask, like, okay. Cool. That sounds great. No pushback. See everybody get angry. I used to be angry like this too. I just get mad at people telling me what to do. Yeah. I’d be like, I’m not going to do it. Like, you don’t even know what you’re doing. Right. And that’s not the right approach, although I’ve tried it, so I can vouch that it’s not the right approach. But your approach is more like, okay, cool,  I’m on board. What is this going to do? What do you think will happen? What are your expectations? It’s just gets the conversation going that you can start roll down into those gaps and it makes people more aware of what they’re doing has a lack of intent. It was funny. I was just talking to another professor yesterday about reframing things. ‘Cause he was teaching it from a sales perspective and he’s like, “Have you ever had to go into a sales meeting where somebody’s asking for something, and it’s not really what they need, and how do you reframe it?” And I was like, “That’s literally my daily life.” Um, cause everybody comes to me and they’re like, we want to do a product transformation and we want to train all of our product managers and I’m like, “Great. So what have you done to enable that what they’re going to learn is sticking.” They’re like, “Oh, what do you mean?” And I’m like, “Okay, well, what kind of product strategy do you have going on? Great. Like what’s the most important things that you could be building?” “Oh, we don’t know.” I’m like, “Okay. So I’m going to teach them that they have to look at that first to figure out how they should be scoping down their work and what they could do in line for the goals, so without that, they’re probably gonna come to you. Like I could train them, but they’re going to come to you and ask for that. So are you prepared to answer those calls?” “Oh no.” “No worries. Okay. So let’s work on that first.” Peter: At some point, you have to wonder how these companies are in business. Melissa: Well, it’s a lot of them found really interesting problems. It’s a problem that they’ve managed to solve somehow, that’s just good enough for the moment, that people really need it. And they’ve made a lot of money doing that. If you’re a startup, and you’re starting this from scratch, you don’t have any runway so you are spending the time to get it right, because otherwise you never make it out of startup phase. If you don’t do the research, if you don’t find that product market fit, you are never making it to the next phase.  But when you make it to the next phase, a lot of companies are like, “Oh, I don’t know what to do next.” So they just start spinning their wheels. And they forget to go back and do what they did in the startup mode, which is all that research to really figure out and define what comes next. Because I think they panic, and if you hit the growth stage, taking VC money, they’re like OK, you’ve got five years to IPO. And you’re like, “Oh, I’m making $5 million a year right now. How do we get to 150?” And you’re just throwing ideas at the wall, ‘cause you panic and you don’t go, “Well, how did I get to 5 million? Let me think about it. How do I get to 10 million? How do I refactor some of these things and strategically think through it,” they’re like, “Oh, we just build and we just build.” And I think a lot of people associate more features with more money.  Peter: Well, right? ‘Cause they can assign a value to it. Even if fictional, but they can put them in a spreadsheet. Melissa: Yeah, I was talking to my students at HBS, they build teams and companies and stuff. And one of them said, “Well, we got like one beta user and I think they’re great and we’re going to build some more features for them. And we’re trying to figure that out.” And I was like, “Why more features?” Like what – what’s that do. And they’re like, “Well, we just figured that they’d want more features,” “Well, did you ask them about the features you have? Like, are they using those right now?” They’re like, “Oh, we didn’t actually think about that. I just thought if we had more features, we could charge more money,” and I’m like, “Oh, so for like, what’s the core problem you’re solving, right.” “Well, yeah, that’s right.” Okay.  And then they take a step back and they go look at it. But I think we kind of adopted that mentality at scale that more is better, more is more money and doubling down on your core problem that you solve and making that really awesome gets lost in the sauce. Jesse: Yeah, it feels like if prioritization is going to be such a huge part of the value that you deliver, you have to build up your own prioritization filter for yourself. That’s what you need to be able to bring to that.  Melissa: To me, like, what you were saying, just that the prioritization framework is product strategy. And when I get a lot of product managers who go, I don’t know how to prioritize those things, because you’re missing that product strategy. And a lot of people go, “Oh, our product strategy, we know where we want to be in five years and we know what we’re doing tomorrow.” And I’m like, “Okay, but what’s in the middle of that. Product strategy is that thing that connects that longterm to what are we doing right now? And what do we have laid out for the next two months? That’s the piece of the prioritization framewor that’s almost always missing in every company. Jesse: You’ve mentioned research a few times now, as one of the key drivers of that prioritization for you. I mean, obviously the business concerns are there. But I’ve heard you talk about research a lot more than I think I hear most product managers talk about research informing their decisions. And I’m curious about what you see as the ideal relationship between product management, research, and design as design and research are often very closely aligned, but it sounds like research needs to be driving product management at least as much as it’s driving design, if not more. Melissa: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I don’t think you can make decisions without understanding what problems your customers have or where you fall short right now. And I don’t think enough companies spend that time really getting into that. If I was going to build a team from scratch today, the first hire I would do is a user researcher. When you’re a product leader, you don’t have time to go out and do that yourself, So you have to build that relationship into your team and that role to make sure that you’re getting the insights. I always look at it as, you’re taking all these different inputs and synthesizing them into a direction. And it’s not necessarily synthesizing it into a solution, it’s synthesizing it into a direction. And that’s the intent.  So I’m looking at qualitative user feedback. I’m looking at usage data. I’m looking at business financials. I’m looking at revenue, cost drivers of what our current products are. Yeah. Or we’re spending money and where we may need to shift spend. I’m looking at trends in the different markets and competitor analysis, and I’m taking all of that information and I’m synthesizing it into, Where do we go next?  And that’s not, Where do we go tomorrow? That’s where do we go for the next six months? Where do we go for the next year? And that’s that missing middle piece that’s usually gone from companies, to connect the strategy back into what are the teams doing on a day to day basis. Peter: One of the challenges I’ve seen is, as companies grow, they have product teams. How those teams are defined will vary by company. Sometimes they are actual products that they’re putting in the market. Often they’re different aspects of some larger service experience. If you’re Lyft or Uber, you’re going to have multiple quote “product teams” working on the rider experience. There’s not real products there. It’s all one product. but, you can’t have a team of 200 trying to work on one thing. So you break them up into teams that are able to kind of digest the work.  And so these product teams get siloed, they focus on what’s in front of them, their metrics, good product teams doing it the way that you would recommend, in terms that they know the outcomes they want to drive towards, they’re doing experiments to get to those outcomes, et cetera, et cetera.  And so I’ve seen the role of design to almost run contrary to that siloed product organization and have design really just live across the experience, so that designers aren’t quote “embedded” in product teams, designers are responsible for some end-to-end experience and they intersect and interact with these product teams that necessarily have to have their focus in order to do their job. I’m wondering how you see that relationship between the focus of the delivery of these teams that needs to deliver, especially as these companies grow, these end-to-end services that can get quite hairy and complex. Melissa: Yeah. I’ve worked with companies that were that way and then I’ve seen it organized more through product lines. I think it depends on which type of products you’re building. Where you’re talking about, it seemed to work super well in the services type businesses that you’re talking about. I’ve seen other places where it’s not a huge user journey all the way through, and you can break the teams up around jobs-to-be-done. These teams are probably not seeing super specific scope and it’s not so technically complex. The team is almost an experience team, rather than a technical team.  I find when we do org design with product managers, they typically look to put them around, major jobs-to-be-done, around different products, and if feature sets get too complex to manage, we’ll start to break those jobs up into multiple teams to solve it.  So if you go into each one of those jobs-to-be-done, are those different feature areas? And designers building for that. They’re not necessarily impacting everything across the area, but when you have a totally intertwined journey, where your products plug into that journey, that’s where I see design sitting across everything. It makes total sense. Jesse: What do you wish design leaders understood better about the role of product management? That if they did understand it, it would improve their relationship with product managers. Melissa: Ooh, that’s a really great question. I think one of the things is, how much the other systems come into play in making a successful solution. That it’s not just about getting the screens right and experience right for that perspective. That is a piece of building a successful company.  I teach a CPO accelerator group for product leaders trying to become executives. And I was just telling them, your job is no longer just the success of your product at that position. It’s the success of the company. And I see that’s the tension that a lot of people get into with design leaders too. I think it’s any leader who’s not seeing themselves as beholden to the company’s success, not just their individual solution or their individual feature success or their product success. And I think when both people are in that mindset, the product leaders, the design leaders, they’re both like, I know I will have to make trade-offs with parts of my design to meet the business’s needs, but I also will sit here and advocate for the customer as well, but I’m not going to be unreasonable. I’m going to work with everybody through this because I know it’s best for the company. That’s where I see these relationships work. And I say that, too, to my product managers for salespeople, because product and sales butt heads like crazy. I’m like, okay, now you’re an executive. You gotta go sit with that VP of sales and know there may be a feature that you weren’t going to plan. But eventually you might have to bump that up just to make sure this company can survive. If that’s the thing that it really takes, we have to be willing to work with that. We don’t get to operate in a perfect system. It would be great if everything was perfect and we didn’t have to worry about money, and we didn’t have to worry about anything. We build awesome products that people love and not have to worry about the implications. But, at the end of the day, the company has to survive. Otherwise we won’t get to build anything. Peter: Thank you, Melissa, for joining us. This was great. I actually learned a bunch, and I suspect others will too. So we’ve talked about your book, Escaping the Build Trap. We’ll make sure that everyone knows about that. Where and how else can people find you? Melissa: if you want to check out my website, it’s MelissaPerri.com. I run a company called Produx Labs as a consultancy, and an online school for product managers that teaches them what to do that’s not scrum, um, productinstitute.com. And I now have a new class for executives where we’re teaching them how to build great product strategies and really move it to the C suite, at cpoaccelerator.com. Peter: When, when do you sleep? Melissa: Never. I was up at like four, o’clock this morning. ‘Cause I was like, I have so many ideas!  Peter: I, yeah, I was just, I was getting tired, just hearing of all the activities and professional things that you’re doing. Well, that’s awesome. So again, thank you so much for joining us and, take care and see you on the internet. Melissa: Thank you. Jesse: As always Peter and I want to hear from you. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. You can also find us on our website, http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find an archive of all our past episodes and full transcripts. We’ll see you next time.