Finding Our Way

Transcript Cold Open Sally: Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me. You know, cause people are trying to kill you. Intro Peter:  I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Both: And we’re Finding Our Way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.   Jesse: On today’s show, design leader Sally Carson of Duo Security joins us to talk about her path to design leadership, growing a design team inside a fast scaling startup, managing your boss, managing burnout, and a whole lot more. Sally: So I currently lead product design and user research for Duo Security, and Cisco acquired Duo about two years ago now. So I’m now part of Cisco. Yeah. Peter: And how long have you been at Duo? Sally: I joined Duo five and a half years ago. Dug Song, the CEO, hired me to build out product design from scratch. They had one user experience designer at that time. But I renamed it to product design at that time, very deliberately… Peter: From user experience? Sally: From user experience, yeah. Part of my rationale, why I renamed user experience to product design was to recast it internally within the company, because the engineers and the product managers did have some familiarity with working with the one user experience designer. And I was coming in with a different approach and I wanted to say this isn’t the way that you’ve been operating. This is a different thing, different flavor. Peter: What was your different approach? How did your approach differ from what they were doing? Sally: One fundamental difference. I was just able to get resources and budget to actually staff up because I think by the time I joined, it was one designer for maybe 30 engineers and just, you know, that ratio really limits what you’re able to do. I also was intent on bringing in a user research competency and building that out. So any expectations that had been set in the prior years about how they had operated with the single user experience designer, I wanted to make it clear to everyone that this was going to be a different way of operating, in part, just because we were going to have healthier ratios to start with. So that really changes the type of work that you’re able to engage in. Peter: So you really wanted just a clean break from the before time to your leadership time. Sally: Yeah. I’ve found that in general, it’s some of the most challenging work that we do. And we’re talking about driving cultural change. I find it’s easier if you’re working with someone who has no sense of what it means to work with design. It’s almost more difficult if you have someone that has a really strong preconception. They’re like, “I understand exactly what this is,” but their conception of it is different from what you’d like it to be. Jesse: Enough knowledge to be dangerous, right. Sally: Yeah. I’ve been interested in, sometimes you all mentioned, change management as opposed to transformation and that nuance, if I remember it’s like the way you defined it, Peter, change management is more like the end state is known and it’s just the process of getting there. Whereas transformation, the end state may not be as well understood. Is that it? Peter: Right. Exactly. And well, has that been your experience with Duo? Like, were you continually transforming into states that people weren’t quite sure where you were headed? Sally: It was definitely transformative. There’s an improvisational aspect to it where I sort of had a vision of what we wanted to get to, but the way that I staged it progressively, it did take some, just adapting to the environment at the time, because we were also going through hypergrowth. So the context was changing. At least every six months, it was a different company. Peter: Was that a vision that you established when you joined, when it was just you and that one other designer? Sally: What I came in with was a hodgepodge of what I had seen as best practices throughout my career. Like I think at that point, I would have been about 15 years into my career. And so I had seen one particular shop had done agile really well, and had found a way to integrate design fairly well into agile. A different shop had healthy ratios, a different shop had really strong research. So I was trying to pluck from the best that I’d experienced and put it together and basically create the design team that I always wanted to work within. Peter: Had you primarily been in startups up to that point, what was the nature of your background before joining? Sally: So let’s see. I’m an army brat. I moved all around. Eventually we settled in Virginia and I did go to college. I got a BFA in communication, arts and design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Peter: So you’re a graphic designer. Sally: Yeah, I got graphic design training. It was really a mixed bag of video, animation, illustration, graphic design, and then amazing faculty that had us reading, you know, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky, which for my 19-year-old brain was probably mostly over my head. But as I reflect back, it’s come in handy quite a lot, you know, just to make sense of, like, the changing media landscape, for example. Jesse: How did you find your way into digital? Sally: So I would have been at VCU in the mid-to-late nineties and there was no web component to my schooling, but I was interested in the web and yeah, I just started doing what a lot of folks at that time did, which was just view source, copy, start hacking it, and figure out FTP. And then I got really lucky because my first job out of school was a small, educational startup In Charlottesville. And they hired me as a full time illustrator, which is pretty extraordinary. But then when I joined, they found out I knew how to code. And they were like, “Oh, you’re upgraded to multimedia developer.”  I’m really fortunate where I have this career arc, where if you trace my job titles through the years, it’s a complete parallel to what was happening at large within the industry. Like, I was a multimedia developer. I later was a web designer, interaction designer, user experience designer, product designer, like that is how we all do about our titles through the years. Peter: Sadly those, Radford surveys that everyone has to use, in order to base industry compensation on, still refer to us as, like, web designers. Cause they’re like way out of date. Sally: Gosh, yeah, come on, Radford. Get it together. Jesse: Hey, taxonomy. It’s hard. Sally: It is. Yeah. Peter: So, how do you go from being a multimedia developer to a design leader? Sally: I had plans to move up to New York in the summer of 2001. I rented an apartment up there. And I, found a Polish cyber cafe, and they had satellite internet and that was the only high speed in Greenpoint at the time. And I bartered with them to get high-speed satellite internet on the roof of my Greenpoint apartment building, by redesigning their website. Peter: Nice. Sally: And I worked it out with my boss at the time. That startup in Charlottesville, I was like, I have high speed internet up in New York. Let me keep working remotely. And so I moved up. I lost my job within, I don’t know, three or six months. They were just like, this remote thing is odd and it’s not really working out. And I was like, okay, that’s fair enough. And then there were no jobs. In New York City in particular, there are no jobs. I was unqualified to wait tables, to, you know, be an assistant, to do any kind of administrative work anywhere. At the time in New York City, the job ads for anything web-related were like secretary / webmaster. Isn’t that so odd where they’re like, this is just pure administrative work and yeah, I couldn’t… Jesse: And also, can you configure IIS for us… Sally: Yeah. Yeah. Peter: How well can you navigate the shell? Sally: Yeah, very poorly.  So I became a bike messenger and did that right after 9/11 in New York for about a year. It was such an amazing job and it’s such an amazing time to have that work, to get to see every secret pocket of the city that most people don’t have access to. It was just an adventure.  Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me, you know, ‘cause people are trying to kill you when you’re a bike messenger in New York. Like the taxis hate you there. They are trying to kill you. People are doing dumb things that are dangerous. They’re doing scary things that are dangerous, on purpose. And I just learned how much, the more I would engage and get angry and feed into it, it would build my anger, but if I could just let it go and let it wash over me, and not replay the bad incidents in my mind over and over, just really changed my relationship with how I can deal with difficult people or difficult moments, that was helpful for life and for my career. Peter: For becoming a manager. Sally: It’s not like I’m fully enlightened. I do notice now, if I’m replaying a situation that made me angry, it just feeds into it. It makes me more upset. You know, I carry that bad emotion with me. It drains me. Peter: Right. Right. So you’re a bike messenger. At some point you must get back into design and into design leadership. Sally: Yeah. I was doing a lot of bartering to get things that I needed, still doing design work. And then, the grand finale of my bike messenger career, I did a East Coast bike trip with two friends of mine, two girls from Virginia.  We were raising money for cancer research. And the three of us rode our bikes from the border of Canada to Miami in three weeks.  Jesse: Wow.  Sally: It was too, it was too much, it was too hard, it was nearly a century, which is a hundred miles, every day for three weeks straight. And the first day of that trip was my first century I ever did. Yeah.  That trip just taught me, How do you do a hundred miles? You really do it a mile at a time. You know, you’re like, okay, five more miles. And then five more miles. And then five more miles you’re just chopping it up into these little bits. Thanks for indulging me on all the bike stuff.  Jesse: Well, I think that bike stuff is relevant, honestly, because I hear a lot of  preparation for leadership there in your various travails on two wheels, whether it’s, shaking off the moment-to-moment bad feelings of contending with aggressive drivers in New York City, or just getting up every day and facing another hundred miles on that long ride. Those are lessons in resilience, honestly, that I think are essential for any leader to learn if they’re going to be successful. Sally: That’s great. Yeah, it certainly gave me confidence. As we went through the Virginia portion of that ride, some pals of ours rode that leg with us. And this one guy, Ed, was working at a company called Crutchfield at the time in Charlottesville. And I was just chatting with him, riding next to him. And he’s like, you know, we’re hiring a web designer. So call me up when you get back from this trip.  So then I became a web designer. Crutchfield is an eCommerce shop and they sell high-end audio and video equipment. And I joined right as they were transitioning away from a print catalog business into an eCommerce business. We were borrowing a lot of ideas around qual and quant from what Amazon is doing at the time. So we were doing funnel analysis, AB testing, tracking conversion metrics. So that was great for just learning chops around quant informing product decisions. And then we also partnered it with qual.  Music break 1 Peter: You mentioned, when you joined Duo, the ratios were out of whack. There was one designer for 30 engineers. So I’m guessing early on, you knew you needed to recruit and hire and build out a team. That was five and a half years ago? Sally: Yeah. Peter: I’m wondering if there are stages of your job, stages of your team, how you evolved, how things evolved around you. Sally: Definitely. But early on, we just needed to grow and we needed to build a team pretty quickly. And I had joined Duo at… I was four months pregnant with my first and only kiddo, so there was also an external deadline, you know, I needed to build up a little nucleus of a team quickly. Peter: Five months before you were going to be gone for a while. Sally: Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to make some hires and got a couple of product designers in, got a user researcher in. And really what I wanted to emphasize with the org was the power of user research. And to quickly try to get us to a place where we’re getting beyond strictly usability testing. Peter: What was the opportunity for user research? What did you witness that was lacking that you felt user research could address? Sally: Happily Duo was already so customer centric, they really were, so the stage was set in a really great way for me. Because when we’d bring engineers and product managers to observe the usability testing, it, like, pained them to hear the customer struggling and to watch the customer struggling, which was great. You know, I didn’t have a team that was dismissive of that kind of feedback.  Peter: I’m curious how you framed the advocacy for user research. I think we’re seeing that it’s easy to build out design orgs because more designers means more assets. The value of user research is less clear, I think, for these organizations, because they’re not making anything, they’re not producing material… Jesse: It’s less quantifiable at least…  Peter: Yeah. And so how were you able to advocate for user research and going beyond the expected usability, into stuff that’s more generative? What were the stories that you found that worked? What were stories that maybe you tried that didn’t work? Sally: One thing that’s been really beneficial for us is to come and present short consumable research nuggets at all-hands meetings. What I really wanted to get away from was, user research goes off for six weeks and comes back with a 30 page PDF. It’s very participatory. So I think that’s a high level theme. How can we make design and research as participatory as possible, and really bring people along for the ride, co-create together so that they’re truly invested in it. What that might look like for those early days of usability testing are bringing those engineers and product managers into the room and having glass on one side of the lab. In a hallway where people are walking by, including our cofounders, so that they can see what’s happening in there, generates a lot of interest. Jesse: So kind of raising the literal physical visibility of the work. By not having it take place off site or in a sealed off soundproofed room that nobody even knows what’s going on behind that door. Sally: That’s right. Yep., really exposing it. And then, because we’re bringing them along for the ride, getting them excited about it as a unique differentiator for us. Like, I’m not aware of other cybersecurity companies that have this rich investment in design research. So it becomes a point of pride. Peter: So you mentioned the CEO’s name… was it Dug? I’m curious to hear more about your relationship with him. If you’ve listened to some of our past episodes, we talk a lot about relationships and in particular for leaders in the position you’re in, there’s a lot of need to manage up and get, maybe not just Dug, other executives also understanding what you’re doing and onboard. How have you approached that? Sally: I had done my own internet of things hardware startup prior to joining Duo, for about three years. And he was an advisor and a mentor to me as a first time founder. So I was learning from him directly through him mentoring me, but also just the modeling, watching how he was running Duo as a super successful startup and doing it in a way that’s so humane and customer-centric and people-centric for the employees. So that was wonderful because coming in,  already having had a foundation with the CEO and a relationship there.   Chester’s my boss, and he leads engineering. And between Dug and Chester, they both are so sympathetic to what design can do, and the value of investing there. It was so helpful for me. It really set the stage where I didn’t have to work, upstream or fight gravity. You know, I was finally in company where generally they understood the value and they understood why I was there. I had enough credibility that they trusted me to give them things that they didn’t ask for and to show them why that was valuable. Jesse: How did you earn that credibility? Sally: I think in part, having had that relationship with Dug prior to working together. But then, you still have to prove it out in your new organization, even if you have the relationships. It’s so key to deliver some quick wins, even if they’re small in scope compared to what you can ultimately deliver.  And if they’re resonating with your audience, whether that’s executive stakeholders or someone else within the org, really socialize the crap out of those small wins, you’re trying to build out an early portfolio of case studies where you’re delivering value to the business that’s concrete, that’s credible, that’s resonating. Jesse: Right, right. What is the role of risk-taking for a new design leader in an organization? Because I’m imagining a leader setting out to go get those quick wins. It can be very easy to choose the safest, least disruptive things to do. So how did taking a chance play into your path at Duo? Sally: Maybe speaking about cycling relates to this. And before cycling, I was a skateboarder, and in the past I’ve been a bit of an adrenaline junkie.  Peter: Not anymore.  Sally: Not anymore. I don’t know. There’s so much adrenaline hammering me from the outside world right now that I’m like, I just want peace. I just want calm. Jesse: We’re all on a mountain bike right now. Sally: Totally. Totally. So risk was a big part of it. That’s kinda been, my M.O. is just take huge swings. I can’t imagine being successful in this role without having a big appetite for risk. Peter: What were some of the risks that you took? Sally: I had not gotten formal training on being a good leader, a good manager. I hadn’t had any block-and-tackling on that. And I was building out a big team. So for me, there was a lot of learning along the way, just on the basics of being a strong leader, being a good manager, and kudos again to Chester because he has done such an incredible job of building out what he and I sometimes called a “leadership factory.” When you’re in hyper-growth, you have to develop successive waves of leaders, your top talent, ICs that are interested in the management track. How are you going to develop them into managers in 18 months? And. Who are the next wave of directors that could be credible in that role and how can you set them up for success and not extend them beyond what they’re capable of now. And we all go through the same training when you join as a manager. And, that helps because we have a shared language and understanding. There’s a shorthand when we’re using the same nomenclature, but there’s a really high investment in Duo around professional development.  I have not encountered an organization better than Duo, that’s better at helping people become first-time managers and then grow their careers from there. It’s very thoughtfully done and we put a lot of investment there ‘cause we want to retain people long-term. Peter: What, if any, distinction do you make between management and leadership? Sally: Yup. Oh, this is good, Peter. ‘Cause I feel like you have some thoughts on this if I, if I recall.  And it’s good, ‘cause I think you’ll disagree. Peter: Well, but I’m wondering because it sounded to me almost like you were using management and leadership interchangeably, and we’ve discussed them as distinct. Sally: Oh, that’s so good.  I do make a distinction between leadership and management. I think it’s a Venn diagram in my head. There are managers who are not leaders. There are leaders who are not managers, but there are managers who are leaders and, anybody can be a leader in a sense, there are people who are influential over the organization’s culture and they might be individual contributors who don’t have any direct reports, but the way that they carry themselves is either an embodiment of how we all want to show up organizationally, or maybe they’re highly influential over the product or other aspects of the organization.  There’s a great book that I love called Speaking as a Leader. And I kind of use it as a tuneup every six months. I’ll just listen to like 20 or 30 minutes of it to refresh myself. And it’s so handy because it talks about how, at any given time as a leader, you need to be really clear about what your current talking points are, what you’re saying.   Being thoughtful about the way you show up and being aware of your audience at any given time. It requires high emotional intelligence, but sort of a different flavor of emotional intelligence. There’s the one-on-one emotional intelligence. There’s also power in reading a room, like the one-to-many kind of emotional intelligence. Not just being mechanistic and transactional, the way that managers who aren’t leaders can be, but really reading the room, maybe surfacing things that are going unspoken that are too dangerous for individuals to say and using your role power as a leader to go ahead and put voice to things that people who are maybe underrepresented or don’t hold that much power would be putting themselves at risk to say. It’s easier to train people on management. Are you doing your one-on-ones? Are you building trust with your direct reports? You know, here’s how you delegate work. But it’s a great entry point into leadership at large because management is a little bit more accessible. It’s a little more like, okay, here’s your checklist. As a first time manager with a few direct reports, make sure you’re doing these things. Just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And you’ll inevitably encounter new challenges, So there’s no real way to practice it without just doing it. Music break 2 Peter: What are the leadership skills that have been the hardest for you to acquire and learn? Sally: This is where I get kind of selfish. I’m like, “Ooh, maybe Peter and Jesse can teach me some things here.” Peter: That’s fine. Sally: Honestly, it’s been such a joy to be able to hold one position for so many years because there’s things I learned in the course of five and a half years that I wouldn’t possibly have had the opportunity to learn if I had only stayed for two or three years. You know, a product manager might make a key decision on strategy, leave the company. And I get to see how that played out over the next few years. And they didn’t get that learning cycle. Then I notice how I’m changing, my team is changing, the context is changing right now.  What’s top of mind for me is energy management. I have days full of meetings and there might be a really important meeting at 3:00 PM where my energy is really flagging. And I’m really just like mentally fatigued because of context switching, so that afternoon slump, if that happens to collide with a really critical meeting, that’s intellectually intense or even emotionally intense, that’s one of my biggest challenges, is just like managing energy. Staying mentally sharp when I need to, right? ‘Cause it’s almost pointless for me to be there if I’m not mentally sharp for some of these conversations. So what do you got for me? You got any advice? Jesse: Yeah. Well, in general, I think design leader happiness, and day-to-day satisfaction tracks very strongly with the leader’s ability to control their own calendar. Sally: So true. Yeah. Jesse: And, to the extent that you are able to create space in your calendar for yourself to give yourself what you need to show up at your highest level of capability, that’s, what’s gonna make you successful. It’s challenging, though, because in most environments, design leaders don’t have enough authority over their calendar. They are working to rhythms that are set by other departments.  Peter: I’m a fan of the 20-to-30 minute coffee nap. Sally: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.  Peter: It seems silly, but if you can take it at the lunch break, if you can give yourself an hour at lunch and you spend that first half hour eating and the second half hour trying to doze, even if you close your eyes and try to ignore stimulus for half an hour and you don’t sleep, you will reset a bit. Because I’m like you, I’m not great with intellectual energy in the afternoon. I try to do all my intellectual energy in the morning, and then in the afternoon, that’s where I’m doing more kind of administrative stuff. But if I have to do intellectual energy in the afternoon, I will take a nap. If I can get even 20 minutes to try to refill my energy cup, so I can be alert. You know, I know people who burn out, even when things are fine, ‘cause they just keep working. There’s a category of person who keeps working, and I think a lot of folks burn themselves out unwittingly, unknowingly.  That said, burnout is also organizational, contextual, situational, right? Certain contexts lead themselves to burnout. It sounds like Duo is actually not one of those. The prosocial culture you’ve been talking about, I’d be surprised if burnout was a problem, just because of sensitivity that the leadership has had. Jesse: It sounds like people are really watching out for each other there, which is the big thing that leads to burnout in so many organizations. That there basically isn’t anybody watching to notice that you’re burning yourself out over there. Sally: That’s right. I’m so lucky the culture is so healthy at Duo and I try to not take it for granted because it has been so long since I’ve been an employee elsewhere. I think Yahoo is really the last place I was an employee and that would have been 2005-6. You’re making me think of something as you’re talking about burnout. I think I’ve experienced two flavors of burnout. I’ve experienced the one where I’m just simply overworking and maybe something like adrenal fatigue, if that’s a real thing. And some of that for me has been not appreciating my own value. What I mean is I need to over-perform, I need to overdo it, I need to overdeliver because I didn’t have the intrinsic confidence in the value that I’m bringing. And really have worked hard to try to train myself out of that and say, this is what I’m able to give today. And I understand that that’s valuable and that’s why I’m here. That’s why they’ve asked me to be here, yeah. Jesse: I think that’s a real pitfall, especially for new leaders who are like, “I’m moving into leadership for the first time. I feel like I’ve taken on the mantle of leadership.” Right? And they put all these expectations on themselves about how they now need to show up, that is different from how they were showing up before. And it’s true. Leadership does have its own set of requirements, but people build that up into this thing, especially that they need to be the hardest-working person on the team by every perceivable measure, in order for them to continue to earn their place at the head of the table, so to speak. Sally: That’s so true. That’s so true. Really, they’re doing their team a disservice because they need to model to their team taking care of themselves. Taking vacation time, not sending those late night emails.  Peter: I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize the importance of modeling. They just, they tend to… Jesse: Do, as I say, not as I do. Peter: But people do as they do. ‘Cause that’s how we’re programmed. Jesse: There’s another facet of this that’s related to the culture of leadership and the cultures that leaders establish for their organizations through what they model. You mentioned that you report into an engineering organization. In most contexts, I would say that if I heard from a design leader who was reporting into an engineering organization, I would assume a certain set of cultural difficulties that would come along with thatm of the differences between the way that an engineering organization wants to manage its work and the way that design work wants to be managed, and potentially really conflicting values on the part of a design leader versus an engineering leader in terms of how they make decisions, how they orchestrate the work of their teams, how they communicate. All of those kinds of things.  So I wonder what advice you might have for other people who find themselves as design leaders reporting into engineering organizations, for how to manage that relationship effectively. What do you think makes for an effective partnership when design is situated within an engineering culture? Sally: For me, it really comes down to the leader. So Chester, my boss, has worked with designers before. I feel like on a deep level he groks what I’m here to do. And there’s just so much trust there.  I’ve learned so much from him talking about modeling and leadership. He’s got such a learner’s mindset. He really listens deeply. He’s open to learning. He will always offer his perspective, but he granted me that autonomy and gave me the space and time that I needed to prove what I was trying to do and to build that credibility. So I think if you’re going to sit within eng, it’s really important to have the right leader as your head of eng.  Some of the benefits of being in eng, is eng tends to get budget for headcount, so that’s kinda nice. And in the early days, as we were just getting started with my team, we really did want to be in lockstep with eng because they were shipping really frequently. So we wanted to really embed with them, co-create with them. And it was helpful organizationally, so much came for free, was sitting in the same place within the organization, so much communication, there was no silo.  Then, as we built out research, then the opportunity became, Now, how do you make sure you’re also partnering in a really strong way with product management, as we kind of became more mature, became more strategic. But in those early days, when we were a little bit more delivery/execution focused, sitting within eng, was very helpful. And it hasn’t really been an impediment to us since in large part because of Chester, because of my leader. Peter: You said you had the autonomy to run your team, as you see fit, regardless of who your leader is. Sally: That’s right. I’m not expected to run it as though it were an eng team, which is helpful, yeah. So, we were able to demonstrate a different way of working. Peter: It sounds like when you joined Duo, in terms of things like culture, leadership, you hit a jackpot as a new design leader in an organization where a lot of the challenges that other design leaders face in other organizations just weren’t there. I’m wondering, though, how, if at all, that changed with the Cisco acquisition. ‘Cause now there’s a whole set of relationships that you didn’t have before, new people that you’re interacting with. How have you had to shift or change how you relate up and out, now that you’re within this much broader context? Sally: Yeah, I guess the fundamentals are still the same, which is: build relationships, identify who your key partners need to be, and just spend the time to build that trusting partnership. And, I’m happy to say, I haven’t really encountered much in the way of politics at Cisco, which is pretty extraordinary. ‘Cause it’s a huge company. But honestly, like, I’m still learning my way. I’m still finding my way. It’s a massive org and it’s a new set of skills I’m currently developing. How do you seek and gain alignment across a broader organization where you’re not necessarily directing those resources? That’s an interesting pickle. Peter: So what are some steps that you’re taking to realize that? Sally: Hm, I think Duo does have a lot of credibility within Cisco. And so using our organization as a model is one. Again, same playbook, build out those case studies and socialize them to demonstrate what we do and credibility, and then really invest in one-on-one relationships with your key partners, just spending time understanding what are their needs, what’s challenging them. That’s been foundational for me. I’m sure if we talk again in a year, I’ll have new stuff. There is something else on burnout. Can I take us back to burnout for a second? Okay.  ‘Cause I’m again, selfishly, I’m curious to hear what you all have to say.  Peter: And clearly this is something you’re dealing with. I don’t know why in a pandemic, you would be considering burnout. Sally: …the smoke-filled air. Yeah.  Peter: That’s right. Sally: Yeah, the other flavor of burnout. So there’s the overwork burnout that I’ve certainly experienced at times. And then the other flavor, I suspect particularly as a design leader, is like a creative malaise where part of it is, how do you continue to maintain a creative practice that rejuvenates you so that you can bring your energy and your spirit into leadership? I find that there’s ebbs and flows of feeling lit up creatively, and there’s a form of burnout for me that I encounter sometimes where I’m not particularly inspired. I know I will come out of it because it’s cyclical, but it’s something like a creative malaise and it’s a real bummer when it hits. And I always know it will resolve itself, but it’s inevitable phase that I have to go through. And it’s always a bummer when it happens. Do you all have that? Jesse: I think, to your point, I have that less when I have creative work to do, and, as a design leader, your access to creative work is highly variable, and in some cases might be more or less nonexistent for very long stretches of time,  before you ever get to offer a creative opinion, you know, move a thing around on a screen, any of that stuff. And I think that you touched on something really important, which is that we think of burnout in general in terms of overwork, that if you’re starting to feel burned out, the thing to do is to do less, but, in fact, what it might be is that you’re just not doing the right things, that you’re not doing things that actually fill you up. That, in fact, what you might need is a little bit less of whatever you’re considering your wind-down time, because it’s not actually replenishing you and you need to go get a hobby. Sally: Yeah. Yeah. Like I really rely on just taking walks in the middle of the day, so it’s really regenerative for me to take a quick walk outside at least once a day, if not a few times, if I have a little pocket of time.  Music break 3 Peter: Also following on Jesse’s response, how creative are you in your work these days? You’re running a 30-person organization, product design and research, maybe… do you have content or other functions in your team as well? Sally: Yeah, we brought in UX writing, UX eng, some design systems, design ops types.  Peter: Right. So you’ve got a team of 30. And, when I think about people in your role, I think of four sets of activities they’re doing: there’s creative leadership, managerial leadership, operational leadership and I’ve added a fourth. I used to just have those three, I’ve added a fourth, which is this executive leadership, kind of strategic. It’s related to creative, but it’s different, ‘cause you’re setting direction in some ways, or having certain kinds of relationships or conversations.  And I think a challenge that a lot of design leaders in your position face is, as Jesse pointed out, you’re not doing the creative work, and I’m wondering if that’s been true for you, how you’ve maintained access to the creative work, or if you’ve elected to delegate much of that. When you do do creative work, how do you know where to focus your creative time and your creative energy? What’s your relationship to creativity within your team? ‘Cause I’m sure it’s not what it was when you were two to five people. Sally: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really different. Now, when we were two to five and maybe up to 15, there would be a Brew:30, Friday afternoons at 4:30. The whole company would get together for happy hour and tap the keg. And it was an extrovert’s dream and all my little tiny baby designers and me who skew more introverted would go hide in our usability testing room and do a quiet drawing hour, where we’d, like, listen to a podcast and not talk, and draw together. And it was the cutest and it was so fun. And outside there was the hum of people talking to one another and that was kinda nice, like that added to the ambience. But I love that quietly stealing away into our little lab and just drawing quietly together. That was really sweet.  These days, as you run through those four pillars, flavors, of leadership, the operational, managerial, I’m naturally drawn less to that. I’m more drawn to the creative and now executive strategy stuff. I have to be really careful though, because with a team of this size, what I don’t want to do is the swoop and poop, where I’m over here doing my executive stuff, and then suddenly I come and mess with people. You know, people do design reviews with me and I give feedback. And the feedback that I try to give is typically not as much around fit and finish. It’s more around, “Oh, they’re not aware that there’s this whole other thing happening with product over here. But if they were able to find a way to weave that together, we could do more with what they’re working on right now. So let me make sure that they’re aware of that they have the right connections, they’re having the right conversations.”  It’s sort of like being a cross-pollinator, being a bridge, doing that organizational wayfinding and having the super high-level context for what’s happening and bringing that into the detailed-level design work. Where I do get involved, I do try to be kind of unapologetically opinionated about anything we design that’s gonna be for the end-user. So we’re a B-to-B company. We sell into the enterprise and we have a couple of key personas and one is like an IT administrator who’s going to deploy and manage Duo, but then he’s going to deploy as a company, and all of his employees have to use Duo as a two-factor authentication device to login to their work. So that’s sort of like the B to B to C in a way, like we are designing for the consumer. We’re selling into the enterprise. I have a background in consumer web, so I spend a lot of time bringing that consumer web lens to enterprise security, which is kind of cool. And my theory,  my belief, is, if we can make the end-user successful, and make that a really great, super friction-free, experience, the value builds up. It makes the IT administrator successful. It makes the buyer successful. The Chief Information Security Officer successful. So what we’re trying to do is shape good security behaviors, it’s a gross term, but in the security space, they call it security, hygiene, you know, good, security hygiene make that end user successful. And that’s where I spend a lot of my attention and time to make sure that’s right. Peter: That sounds like a conscious choice that you’ve made in terms of where you’re devoting that creative energy. Sally: Yeah. And part of it is because those people have not opted into Duo. Duo has been foisted upon them, and I’m thinking, too, that your first encounter with Duo might be as a part of onboarding into a brand new job, you know? So you’re so inundated with new stuff when you start a new job, and Duo is one of a couple dozen things that you get introduced to you on your first day of onboarding into a new job. So understanding that as a context, as opposed to the buyer or the IT administrator, who’s done the research, done a little bit of competitive analysis, and has decided to choose Duo to deploy at their company. So I’m really focused on the person who didn’t opt into this experience and making it great for them. Peter: You mentioned less interest in the more management and operational aspects of your role. In my experience, those are the things, though, that, you know, keep the engine humming, keep the lights on, and if they’re not attended to, the organization starts kind of falling apart. How have you accommodated your less interest in those functions? Is that one of those things where you just occasionally suck it up and like, “Okay. Today is my operational day and I’m just gonna kind of power through that.” Or strategies have you adopted to make sure that that’s getting attended to. Sally: Yeah, I think one is, I’ve just built the self-awareness that those just don’t tend to be things that give me energy. They deplete my energy, but I can do them. And then, finding great leaders and great people who I trust that I can delegate work to who tend to thrive doing that type of work. Like, that’s the magic is when you find the peanut butter to your jelly, right? Like someone who’s like, “I love doing the ops stuff. That’s my jam. This is what gives me life.” And then it’s a win-win, you know, it’s like every time there’s taxes and I’m like, I can’t believe there’re CPAs and they love doing this. It’s so great. What a gift to humanity, these people. But yeah, they exist, and finding people who are great, almost like when you hear about CEO/COO partnerships and like the role of the COO is so varied and it’s so much depends on essentially, like, the psychographic profile of the CEO. They need to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Jesse: And this is part of why I always advise leaders to tune into what they need for themselves, rather than trying to model the structure of their leadership on what somebody else created for themselves. Because, you know, your strengths are different. The complements that are going to support you are going to be different.  So one of the themes I feel like throughout this conversation, has been the need to continue to be flexible in the face of ongoing change. And as we’re winding up here, I am curious about what changes you see around the corner? Is there a process of change that you’re in the middle of right now that you’re looking forward to seeing through? Sally: Hmm, that’s good. Yeah. I’m in a reflective place right now and I am reflecting quite a lot on… I’m so proud of the work that we’ve done as a team, as a company, I’m really proud of the value that we’re creating in the world. Honestly, it’s such a joy to deeply believe that if more people buy the stuff that we make, the Silicon Valley cliche is, like, “make the world a better place.”  It really does. We help with election security. We help with critical infrastructure. We help the trains run on time. It’s that part that is so cool. And I’m so proud that a design team can have positive impacts on the safety and trust that people feel when they use the internet. Like that is so cool.  Earlier this year, before the pandemic set in, I was pushing myself to explore what it means to savor. And that was, like, a new thing for me. I’m feeling proud, I’m still working, I’m not disengaging from the work, but what does it mean to really savor a big accomplishment that I feel proud of? And, now I’m just reflecting forward on, What is the next chapter? I don’t know. It’s neat to talk to you all right now, because I do feel like I’m in a moment of trying to spend time to understand what that could and should mean for me. Peter: You were referring to some of the societal context that we find ourselves in, and clearly this, this year has been a… Sally: A Whopper.  Peter: A difficult one. And I’m wondering how that has interceded into your and your team’s work lives, or do you try to keep a little wall around your team, and there’s work time and not-work time. Like, for eight hours, let’s focus on this and then, and then not, as opposed to, oftentimes, work and non work-life bleed together. How has that manifested within you and your team and how have you approached that? Sally: I try to be really honest with what I’m struggling with right now, you know, so if I’m having a one-on-one conversation, I try to be really honest about what’s tough right now as an offer of vulnerability. If they feel the need to share, I want to make sure they feel like they can share with me in a way that’s safe. I don’t want to dump on my team and create more stress for them, but I just want to show up as a real, fully-formed human, and, especially because the lines between personal and work life have blurred, if not completely dissolved for a lot of us, and then also trying to remember to bring some joy back.  The thing I did yesterday morning was I spent some time over the weekend playing with gouache, and I hadn’t done that in quite awhile. It’s like a more opaque, watercolor-type of paint. So, if you enjoy pushing color around on paper, gouache is a lot of fun, and I’m just playing with it and getting to know it. And so I just posted that on our team Slack Monday morning, just to remind them, we’re all creative people, and what are you doing to maintain your own creative practice? I try to share a bit of my personal life just to give them permission, if this is something that you would find to be restorative, even in the middle of your workday, giving them permission to do it. When we’re not having fires, if I step away for a 10-minute walk, I’ll post that to the group Slack and say, “Hey, I just need to take a bit to recharge. And I’m going to go for a little walk.” And it’s not important that they know I’m walking. It’s more about modeling and give them permission to do what they need to do to take care of themselves too. ‘Cause that’s so important to me. One of the joys of leadership is getting to have these long-term form relationships with folks that extend beyond the time that you spend managing them. What a joy it is to see someone in the first few years of their career, and then even after they leave your company, getting to see what they do, and they check in with you, and seeing where they go from there. Peter: I think that was a remarkably, positive, affirming note to wrap this discussion on, so, at least for me, thank you, Sally. Thank you for taking the time. It was great having you and I don’t want to speak for Jesse. I actually, because I actually have to bounce.  Jesse: (joking) I had a terrible time. Fantastic. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.  Peter: And that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, you can find Jesse and I on Twitter. I’m @peterme he’s @jjg. You can also find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/, where you can find past episodes with complete transcripts, as well as a contact form. We read everything that comes through there. It’s a great place to send any comments or questions that you have about the show, anything you’d like to hear us talk about in future episodes and with that, thank you for your attention and as always keep on finding your way.

In which Jesse and Peter dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change. Transcript Peter: Oh, shit. Design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and, caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz, Jesse: And I am Jesse James Garrett… Together: …and we are Finding Our Way… Peter: …Navigating the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership.    Jesse: On today’s show Peter and I dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change. Peter: One of the things that I think is interesting that I’ve seen more of during our break is a legit establishment of this design leadership role that doesn’t assume management.  So, one of the companies I’m working for, a big bank, is hiring up to 20 people who are true senior design leaders. They would be senior manager or director level, but with no expectation of management and direct reports. They are organizational leaders, they are creative leaders, they are strategic leaders. They are there in large part because those folks who do manage are so overwhelmed with their relationship responsibilities, that they need support from folks who can focus on the work. I’m seeing it more and more, and I’m hearing from other design leaders that I’m talking to a desire to establish that role within their organizations. It’s almost like, wait, can we do that? We can have someone who’s really senior, but not manages people? Will they allow that to happen? And it’s like, yeah, if you want it. Jesse: Well, it depends on where you are, and it depends on cultural context that you’re in because, in a lot of cases, one of the challenges with the senior individual contributor is, How do you measure the impact that they’re having beyond the work that they’re delivering? How do you measure the leadership dimension of what that person does so that the organization can know if they’ve got the right people in those senior roles? Peter: How would you measure that if they had direct reports? Jesse: Well, if they had direct reports, then you’ve got a broader set of data to consider in terms of the contribution that the individual is making and the success that they’re finding in the organization. It becomes about team cohesion, team success, team delivery kinds of metrics. Peter: You measure these senior IC leaders similarly, it’s just the team doesn’t report to them. So way this is structured, and I think this is why we’re starting to see this more and more, management is functional, you’ll have design managers managing designers, and design directors managing design managers, and often not just functional within design, but like research managers managing researchers, and content strategy managers managing content strategists. This individual contributor design leadership role is a principal designer role, and s leading a team that is cross-functional within design. So there will be product designers, researchers, content strategists.  So it’s around leading the work, not leading, not managing the resource to put it another way. And then additionally, as they get more senior, they’re very active in leading cross-functionally. So they’re not necessarily directing product people and engineers, but definitely influencing them. And in terms of accountability, these folks are ultimately held accountable for the output of the teams that they are directing. Jesse: So tell me about how formal authority works in these situations because what happens generally is that authority tends to hew pretty closely to reporting structures. Peter: You’re seeing that less and less, I think, in these product development organizations where reporting is functional, but delivery is cross-functional. This is becoming an accepted just way of being. So a design director has less creative authority than the design lead within a cross functional team often, right, because the design lead in a cross functional team, working with the product manager and engineer, is making the design decisions at that level of delivery. And that is where the authority thus resides. Jesse: Yeah. If you don’t have the ability to actively direct the work of a designer, if it is, as you describe, influence, then how do you assess how much influence you have had? Peter: It depends on where you locate creative authority within these structures. So you can imagine at the simplest level, you have two structures: you have your reporting structure of design and engineering and product reporting up through their functions; and then you have the work structure, which is cross-functional teams. Think of that as squads, pods, whatever, where you have a mix of product managers, designers, engineers, working together.  Now in some organizations, they are using that work structure as the management structure. But I’m frankly seeing that less and less. What I’m seeing more and more of is a recognition that we should organize reporting structures by function, because there’s value there: Professional development, recruiting and hiring, there’s value in making it clear how you grow within your function.  But the work is being organized in these cross functional teams, which have their own structure.  When I’ve worked in marketplace models, you’ll have a team dedicated to the sell side of the marketplace and a team dedicated to the buy side of the marketplace. and those become these work structures. And so the creative authority resides on the work side, not on the reporting side. Design directors aren’t coming over necessarily to the work side. They are seen primarily as organizational minders, because there’s plenty of work to do recruiting and hiring, professional development, and one-on-ones, and all that kind of stuff.  But you still need creative leaders. There can be a different authority structure specific to the work from a reporting structure. And so these super-senior ICs might report to a design director, but they lead a set of work in the work structure. Jesse: Who looks after design as a practice in this model? Peter: Oftentimes those leaders will also be practice leads.  So you’ll have your content strategists or UX writers reporting to a manager of content strategy, possibly reporting to a director of content strategy. Director and manager of content strategy own the practice and the reporting relationships. The issue that arises is: I’m a director of product design. And I have product design leads, who report to me who are in the workstream leading work. They are the creative authority for work in their area. What is my job as a creative authority as a director of product design? And my take on it is that the practice leads—director of product design, director of content strategy, director of user research—they establish a framework for quality. So they create the shared understanding of what quality is. The people doing the work are then expected to deliver at those levels of quality. Jesse: And who evaluates that? Peter: So evaluation becomes an interesting question, because in my worldview, and this goes back to our work at Adaptive Path, that creative lead needs to be the sole authority over what gets launched.  That director of product design might look at what that lead product designer’s putting out there and saying, “That’s not living up to our quality standards.” There’s a disjuncture here. In the moment, the director of product design, and unless it is truly egregious and they want to pull the emergency cord, doesn’t really have the authority to stop that work in the construct that I’m putting out there. If the lead in the moment is like, “No, this is what solving the problem. We’re going to launch it.”  Then, if there is a disconnect between an established understanding of quality and what is actually getting shipped under a particular lead product designer, Then there’s a conversation about what’s going on there. Often, what you find going on there is that there are a lot of conditions within that cross-functional team that inhibit that designer’s ability to deliver at the level of quality that the practice lead has established. So then it becomes this other challenge of, “Do we need to encourage new organizational practices to enable us to achieve the level of quality that we are establishing?” Jesse: Right, right. This is a thing that I’ve seen organizations struggle with figuring out, where that line is, how involved the senior most leader is in looking at the details of the creative work being produced by the leads underneath them. And how do they influence practice and process based on that, because a lot of what you’re talking about is stuff that emerges out of the negotiations across a cross-functional team, as they are figuring out how to balance all the considerations in order to deliver. This role, as you’re describing it, that has responsibility for those practices and processes is also pretty far removed from them, and is also really just kind of seeing things after the fact. What I’ve seen is that that loop never gets closed. Energy and attention of the senior-most leader is so focused on things like budget and resources and things like that, that they don’t have the space to be able to actually take stewardship, take ownership of design as a practice in these organizations. Peter: That is definitely an issue, especially as these organizations scale.  But, that’s where Design Operations plays a part.  I was actually just talking with one of the heads of product design that I work with. He has a team 80 or so, and he’s been able to get himself, right now and for the next month or so, where two days a week he’s doing what you would expect a design leader to do: going to meetings, one-on-ones, recruiting, hiring, that kind of stuff.  The other three days a week, he’s working with a small team, small cross-functional team, on building out a vision, a product vision, a North-Star type work for the company. And he recognizes it’s temporary, right? It’s time boxed. This couldn’t be his job forever because he does need to get back to it. But he’s able, for a while, to only do two days a week doing what people consider his job-job. So he can spend three days a week being the creative leader that no one else can be in this organization. And one of the reasons he can do it is he delegated all of his budgetary activity to his head of design ops. Just, like, “You own it. You do it. If you need me to check in, provide direction, give you guidance, whatever, happy to. It’s my org, so I care about this stuff, but literally you are going to all those meetings with the finance people. You are in charge of that now.”  And so I think we don’t do enough to decompose the responsibilities of design leaders, and really recognize all the things that they need to be doing, and, What are those things that really the design leadership should be focused on? And what are the things that they can delegate or put off their plate?  That’s why DesignOps is emerging, is this recognition that design leaders were spending all their time operating and none of their time leading design. But now this other thing is happening is, “Okay. So we’re delegating design operations, oh, shit, design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design. So how do we shift those activities and responsibilities among a set of leaders so that everyone can deliver well on some aspect of this, instead of one person, half-assing a whole bunch of things. Jesse: Right. Right. Peter: And I hear you in terms of we’re not caught up there. And so loops don’t get closed. People are far away from the work and that’s still a problem to solve. Jesse: It takes a village to lead design, right? Peter: Essentially. Yeah. And I think we recognized this 20 years ago in engineering, you’ve had a VP role of engineering, which tended to be the org minder. You had your CTO or architect roles that tended to be what we would consider creative leads or technology leads, the ones figuring out how to solve the problems, the technical problems. So there was that bifurcation happened a long time ago. You had technical program management, is this other function that was then essentially there to support engineering. With the agile revolution, you have agile coaches and scrum masters and all these other people figuring out how to keep the work engine humming. So there had already been this recognition of all these different things that need to get done and a decomposition of activities across roles to enable that to get done, and design is just behind. ‘Cause it’s taken us longer to get to a similar scale.  Music break 1 Jesse: Part of this really has to do with the culture of leadership within the larger organization that you’re a part of, especially how collaborative, how consensus-driven, how consultative the decision-making culture of the organization is, because in an organization that broadly asks its leaders to take a more command-and-control kind of stance, approaching leadership in this way can be really challenging, because even if it feels, to the design leader, like there is a better way to do this, that is more hands off, that distributes power and authority at a lower level in the organization more effectively, they may be contending with a larger culture that looks at what they’re doing, and it looks to them like they’re fucking it up because they’re not leading according to the model that the rest of the entire organization, including the CEO, potentially leads. Peter: Totally. What’s interesting to me– the problem I’ve seen is actually the inverse, where the cultural direction was more bottom-up. It was autonomous product teams. Do whatever you want. The output is crappy, for any number of reasons: it’s not coordinated across these teams, plus there’s not a shared understanding of what quality looks like. And, in this one instance when leadership would review the work of these teams and say, “It’s not good enough, don’t ship it,” these teams would ship it anyway. And there was no accountability. There was no…  Jesse: …that loop closing. Yeah. Right.  Peter: Some organizations could stand to have a little more top-down, command-and-control, to drive quality.  What’s happened in this organization, is they’re at some stage in their cycle where they need a shock to the system to improve quality, and that shock is not going to come from the bottom-up. It’s too fractured. The amount of effort it would take to kind of dial up all these individual teams would be too great.  But one of the benefits of hierarchies, when you can wield them appropriately, is to do a hopefully positive shock from the top-down and say, “No, that’s not appropriate. Here’s some new standards of quality. And if your work is not measuring up to these handed-down standards of quality, then it is not shipping,  and we need to take this approach because the problem is so severe that we need to almost explicitly work in a way that we don’t want to work, work to overcome this issue in an effort to reset.” Try to get a new normal understood within the organization so that after you do this top-down, command-and-control for a while, there’s the understanding, the awareness, the appreciation of that built so that you can then pull back and have some faith that the teams will continue to deliver it, that new level of quality.  So I, I almost, I long for command and control. Which goes against my, a lot of my philosophy as I was saying earlier, the authority has to be given to the person who has accountability for delivery. And that’s usually someone at that level of a product team, shipping stuff. Jesse: So, typically, that locus of power either resides with the creative lead for the particular piece of work as you’re describing, or the person who is that person’s manager, that person’s performance manager. And this third element that you’re talking about, this senior-level individual contributor without performance management responsibilities,feels like this extra thing in these organizations that they’re trying to figure out. How this third center of authority fits in with these other two. And organizations are struggling to give it teeth because the larger organizations are looking at design teams alongside their technology teams and the various other teams that are responsible for delivering all of the functions of the business, and trying to figure out how to make the design team look more like their other teams as much as they can, to simplify their management of a complex cross-functional ecosystem. Peter: In the case of this one company, they have an engineering team that actually is serving as a positive model.  What I’m sensing based on this conversation is what we’re all part of, is there is a shift occurring from whatever was standard, let’s say 20 years ago, that I think was much more like you were saying: a lot more command-and-control, the reporting organization was also the delivery organization. Your manager was responsible for your performance and your output, and their manager was responsible, and, and it was cleaner in some way. And then what happened essentially, is this recognition of, in the 21st century, to succeed in doing work requires cross-functional teams. You cannot go inside an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of a truly cross-functional team. We’re talking design and engineering and product management and data science and marketing, like true cross-functional teams. And the model before was you didn’t collaborate cross-functionally, you did your work and then you handed it off to the next function, and you handed it off to the next function. And so that, it’s not even waterfall model so much as this kind of yeah, the production line model. It doesn’t work when you’re trying to be nimble, responsive. When you’re working in a world of software as a service and, you’re constantly shipping and all that kind of stuff. And so they’ve moved to this cross-functional team where you have representatives of those functions present at all times. We still don’t quite know how to manage complex cross-functional delivery. We know how to manage functional organizations. Certain aspects are still being managed functionally—your professional development and, and your, performance reviews and the skills growth and all that kind of stuff We don’t have clear, well-understood models of how you manage cross functional teams, particularly at scale.  To take what you said moving forward: I just think we’re not there yet. There is not an answer. We’re still figuring it out. And what I think we’re seeing is that issue, the challenge, conflict, that soreness that is happening with design leaders is because we’re trying to manage cross-functional work teams akin to how we managed perhaps in the past, these hierarchical teams and it’s not quite working. And so now we’re trying, let’s go the other direction and it’s all autonomous and every team’s on its own and that’s not working. And we’re stumbling toward what is a model that allows functions to work well together as teams at scale. And no one has really solved that in a clear, repeatable way that people can feel pretty good about. Jesse: It’s interesting that you keep referring back to development methodologies, in that I think that for most of my career, if not all of my career, the conventional wisdom among designers would have been that you should not attempt to manage design the way that you manage engineering, that engineering management practices are too factory floor production line oriented. They don’t have enough flex or space in them for the creative exploration that’s necessary for design. That design as a practice was fundamentally incompatible with the way that technical development gets managed. And it feels like you’re saying that if that was true, that maybe is not as true anymore, or even perhaps that the folks who have been doing this work to define these approaches to technical development have lapped us basically, and gotten out in front on these issues of how to get multiple functions actually integrated together effectively, which is really different from, frankly, most of what I’ve heard from most designers for most of my career. Peter: So they’ve lapped us. I wouldn’t say that they’ve solved it though. If you ever hear of a designer embedded in a product team, squad, scrum, et cetera, that is a model created for engineering delivery. And, it is not a model that leads to good design, but they got out in front of us. They’ve been dealing with these problems longer because engineering orgs tend to be bigger. The value of engineering was more evident to internal leaders. And so they built out engineering orgs sooner.  But these, what are meant to be cross-functional, organizational frameworks definitely skewed towards  supporting engineering over the other functions. That’s actually one of the reasons we wrote the book, was I saw this occurring and I was frustrated because you are right. Design works best in its own way, not by adopting engineering processes. But when design got subsumed into these, what were supposed to be cross-functional, team structures, that were really about how do we help engineering be as effective as it can be, and to heck with anyone else,   design suffered in that regard. People often forget that much of what we think of as agile is simply a way for engineers to to assert the authority over their work, because it had gotten away from them. They were being told by managers, who didn’t actually understand what it took to deliver, what to do. And the engineers were like, no, we’re taking the reins back. Right? It was their own form of, frankly, a kind of quasi-Marxist maneuver. What’s happened, though, is designers haven’t yet done that themselves. Designers haven’t taken those reins. Music break 2 Jesse: All of this makes me very curious about the work that was done by technology leaders, you know, 15 years ago to start pushing the process and organizational change in these organizations, away from the way that software had traditionally been made up to that point. And how they were able to make the argument for such a radically different style to their leadership.  Because, frankly, that is one of the things that we as designers and as design leaders have had the hardest time doing, is simply convincing our leaders that there is a different way to do things and we should be given the permission to try. Peter: Part of their ability to make that change is the phrase, “Double the work in half the time.” And what CEO isn’t going to like pause for a second.  Jesse: “Tell me more,”  Peter: “Yeah. I want some of that.”  I think the challenge, I hadn’t thought about it this way, but it kind of goes back to what you were saying about the difference earlier, but just between engineering practices and design practices, engineering is measured on productivity and how they define quality, which is uptime, no bugs, stability, performance. All very mechanized outputs.  Engineering is not held accountable for business success. Engineering is not held accountable for customer engagement. Engineering is not held accountable for all those fuzzier, squishier impacts on users and customers. Engineering is held accountable for, Are our machines able to do what we want the machines to do? If all you want from design is more design, then, yes, you can put design in a similar context and you will get more design, but that’s, yeah, it’s laughable ‘cause it’s meaningless and, there’s just this fundamental difference in the paradigm of what the value is that design delivers and the value is that engineering delivers. Jesse: And I think it comes back to how that value is communicated to and understood by the senior business leadership. Peter: I thought tou were going to say, “Senior bean counters.” Jesse: That, yes, those, too. So, as you describe the agile transformation, it sounds like those people were able to speak to value in a way that their nontechnical leaders could understand, right? You didn’t have to understand the ins and outs of technical development processes in order to be able to understand the value of “double the work in half the time.” And we don’t even have ways to talk about the value that we’re delivering now, nevermind talking about increasing that value in the future. They already had a reference point for engineering when agile came onto the scene. They had ways of evaluating. They were maybe not the best ways, but they had ways of evaluating that were needles that they could see would be moved by a move to a different approach. And they don’t have that for us. They don’t have needles that they can look at and go, well, this, and this, and this will obviously change if this works the way that you guys say it will. Peter: They do and they don’t. Unfortunately the needles they have for us are productivity needles. That’s why I think much of design as it has scaled has also been reduced to output. My question or my, my wonderment based on what you’re saying is, nor do they have metrics to justify more product management, but they invest in it. Jesse: Okay. So what’s that about? Peter: That’s a good question. I think about this.. I found myself thinking about it again more recently. I find myself wondering why companies keep hiring product managers. They love hiring product managers, but what ends up happening is from a ratio standpoint, you get these ratios out of whack, where you get multiple product managers for a single designer. And I’m like, “Why do companies keep hiring product managers when they don’t have the team to deliver what the product manager is working on?” And I think the reason they keep hiring product managers is that product management is a promise of future value.  Jesse: And design is not even that, is it? Peter: It’s not recognized as that. We know it is, but it’s not recognized as that. So, by hiring a product manager, you believe you are enabling the ability to deliver more product, new product. And with that delivery of more, a new product, the generation of increased value. So, you hire product managers because for every product manager, we can launch another feature and another feature. For some reason, what’s not fully understood or appreciated is when you have product managers, the job of a product manager is to make work for other people. Jesse: Hmm. Peter: And so you have all these product managers generating work, but if you’re not also hiring engineers and designers and others at a similar clip, what ends up happening is, and I’ve seen this, I’ve been in environments where product managers almost literally are walking the halls with requirements, looking for someone to execute on them, just like, “Do you have time? Can you, can you help me build this thing?” And now everybody else is somehow pulled into this person’s insanity. It leads to all these problems. That said, thinking about what you were saying in terms of design and the ability to cleanly and clearly value design, design’s value is essentially the same as product management value. When you want to look at it from a business lens, designers help you with acquiring new customers, help you with retaining customers, help you engage customers, help you potentially get those customers to spend more while they are engaged. So, you know, unlocking more revenue or whatever, right? Those are all metrics that a business cares about. That doesn’t take a lot of imagination to connect a designer’s work to those metrics. Those metrics though, tend to be owned by product, but product doesn’t actually deliver on those metrics or do anything to make those metrics happen. Usually they rely on their teams. And their job is to coordinate the efforts of those teams towards those business goals. As we said, though, the engineers, their metrics aren’t really product metrics. Engineers’ metrics are engineering metrics with this assumption that, I guess, a magic in the system, that if the engineers focusing on their metrics keep machines running and product is focusing on their metrics and value creation, then it’ll all work out.  Now, this is a thought I hadn’t had before. And I think that the hidden connection that hadn’t been realized was the designer is the person who turns that engineering quality into value realized by the product manager. Jesse: And is cut out of the equation altogether themselves. It feels like there is, is a lack of things for designers to uniquely own that have value beyond the aesthetic, beyond the subjective. Peter: That is basically true. There is no meaningful design metric that isn’t also a product metric. You’re making me want to look up a tweet. Hopefully it won’t take long.  On February 23rd, 2020, Jared Spool wrote, “I’m of the belief that in a few years, product management and UX design leadership will be indistinguishable. In some orgs they already are.”  And that, I think, speaks to what we’re talking about.  Jesse: Yeah. I think most of the time, if you look at two different functions in the organization and they are impacting the same metrics, that seems like a pretty good argument that those functions should be combined in some way. You know, maybe design is an adjunct to product management, maybe there is a space for a design practice that is more fully integrated with product management as a way of sort of borrowing that understanding of value and being able to transfer that to the design work. Should designers be reporting to product managers? Peter: Product managers. Hmmm, no. At least not the way that it is typically practiced in most organizations. I think this is another area, as the tweet suggests, we’re seeing change and evolution.  There’s no reason that that product manager can’t be a designer or could not have once been aa designer. And we’re seeing that all throughout the industry, more and more designers are turning into product managers. It’s still the vast minority, but we’re seeing a greater and greater acceptance of designer as product manager, as opposed to historically it was MBA as product manager or engineering lead as product manager. We’re now seeing companies realize like, oh, the product is this thing that people use. Maybe the person who’s managing the product should have a ability to understand that use. Jesse: I have been advocating for at least 10 years now that designers who actually want more authority, want more power, need to move toward product management. They can do product management from a design sort of stance. I don’t think it means leaving behind that creative influence. And in fact, I feel like there is something missing in the practice of product management, as I’ve seen it, that designers bring, which is this holistic experiential sense. That is not something that I’ve seen a part of how product managers do their jobs.  Peter: Right. No, that’s and, that is, I think, largely true. It is changing, but still largely true. It was probably about 15 years ago that you created a talk called The Experience is the Product. Which I don’t think we realized at the time what we were saying. Organizationally, we were just commenting on what we saw in the world, and that instead of focusing on products as these one-offs, we wanted to encourage people to think about a broader experience context in which these products sat.  I have a 2020 version of that talk still called The Experience is the Product, which makes much more explicit that connection between user experience of the word experience, and product management of the word product and that user experience and product management are essentially the same thing. Music Break  Peter: One of the companies I’m working with has come to a realization that the quality of the product that they are delivering is subpar. A few years ago, they brought on a very senior design leader who came in, was given a mandate, looked around, was like, “This isn’t great. I gotta do a lot of stuff. I got to fix this,” and wasn’t able to get traction. Wasn’t able to make kind of change happen that they realized needed to happen. And three years later, this team is still producing crap. As I started digging around, I found out that there had also been, within the last couple of years, a new head of product management and a new head of product marketing hired, who similarly came in, looked around, said, “Oh, I gotta make some changes.” And realized much greater success in making changes in their part of the organization.  So, my initial concern was that it was some type of broadly cultural thing, but no, this new head of product was able to do a real reorg, make some real changes. Their new head of product marketing basically changed how they do product marketing, like the processes by which they operated. And I was like, “Why is it that this new senior design leader wasn’t able to realize their vision, the way that this person’s peers did?” And as I unpacked it, I found out that this new design leader, their leaders didn’t have their back the same way that the product management and product marketing leaders basically ran cover for these new leaders that they brought in.  So when the new product leader or the new product marketing leader is making these changes and ruffling feathers and pissing people off, and the message is going back to their boss, “What’s what’s going on here? So, and so’s doing all this stuff. This is new, it’s different. It’s not right.” Those leaders were like, “You know what? That person’s in charge. If this is what they think needs to happen,  they have my full support.” in this design context, when that happened, those super senior design leaders told this new design leader, “Hey, Hey, you need to back off a bit. You’re upsetting people. You’re not doing it the way we work here.”  And what it pointed out to me is, however senior you are as a leader, you need another leader to support you in the change that you are trying to make. We tend to think that leaders are almost operating on an island or like if they have a strong enough vision they can just carry people forward.  And in reality, leaders need leaders to protect and cover and enable and support them. And it’s not something I had been as cognizant of, until seeing this side-by-side compare-and-contrast of a leader who’s been given that cover and the change they were able to make, and a leader not given that cover and them getting stonewalled. And now years later, I’m hearing that this leader maybe isn’t delivering up to what would be expected. And it’s like, “Yeah, because they weren’t given the support they needed when, they were like, ‘Hey, we should do these things.’” Jesse: You didn’t let them optimize the environment for their own success…  Peter: Yeah, yeah… Jesse: …so don’t be surprised when they’re not successful. Yeah. Yeah. And, this goes back a little bit to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, about the early days of agile and how those folks made the case for that change in those organizations. And it did eventually take somebody up top who didn’t understand the deeper implications, who didn’t understand the reasons for all of the changes, say, “I don’t care that I don’t understand it. I believe in you. And I believe in what you’re doing and I believe you’re the right person to orchestrate this.” And that I think is a level of credibility and trust that engineering leaders had circa 2005 as they were starting to push agile as process change, as cultural change, in these organizations, that designers haven’t gotten to yet. And in fact, product managers have stepped in and they’ve already got more power than we’ve got and they just showed up. Peter: Yeah, I think it ties back to what we talked quite a while ago about trust and about relationships. And I think a lot of design leaders don’t know how important it is to manage up and manage those relationships well, in order to then manage down to get what you want. They come in, look around, they see the problem. They feel it must be evident to everybody and they start trying to make change and it tends to be out and down. ‘Cause that’s where they’re seeing problems are. And they haven’t done the work to manage up, to play the politics, to get the relationships, to get the connections, to get the cover so that when they then do manage down, it’s going to ruffle feathers, right? Change, upsets people. So you need to have prepared yourself and others for that disruption and seeded the ground appropriately to make sure that when there’s the hue and cry about change, you are enabled to continue that change. Not encouraged to just roll it back. Jesse: And I think it’s on the design leader as well to accurately assess the organization’s true appetite for disruption.  Peter: Appetite for disruption!  Jesse: Our new album.  By the way, you have to know that your leadership is already on board with the chaos that’s going to come with change before you start trying to make it, because if you start trying to make that change when you’re not sure if your boss wants it or is ready for it… I mean, we ran into this over and over again, as consultants at Adaptive Path, where would come into organizations, we would be working directly with a client who was very motivated to create change, had gotten the budget to bring us in and had spun up a whole bunch of work around creating that change. But had not accurately assessed their leadership’s appetite for it. And the work ended up dead in the water as a result. Peter: Totally. Totally. Yeah. and while it would be easy to point fingers at the super senior leaders for not providing the cover for this new leader to realize the changes they wanted, I did also realize that this new leader hadn’t done their diligence in making sure they’d had the relationships established. They had gotten very problem-focused and “I’m just going to solve the problem,” which designers do and had lost sight of the people parts around that.  Jesse: And this is really what was behind my pivot toward leadership coaching,  helping individuals maintain that level of awareness and that level of engagement beyond the tactics of delivery, toward: look around the room, who are the people in the room and how are you engaging with them? Because it’s very easy to think that these problems can be solved with more process when actually what you need to be doing is having conversations with people.  Jesse: Well that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thanks, Peter.   Peter: Thank you, Jesse.  Jesse: He’s @peterme. I’m @jjg.   Peter: You can find us on our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you can also find past episodes and complete transcripts of every episode, as well as a contact page where you can send us your thoughts. We read everything that comes through, and those submissions have often spurred further discussions. Jesse: Thanks, Peter.  Peter: Thanks, Jesse. Peter: Me me, me, me, me… Do you have a top knot or back knot or something? Jesse: I have a, I have a high pony. Peter: Is that what it’s called? Jesse: That’s what I’m calling it. Peter: So you have a pony that is high. Jesse: Yes. Yes. Peter: It’s those Oakland oats. Jesse: It’s, it’s wandering around my backyard. Just sort of like eating everything.

In which Jesse and Peter answer questions on funding models, shifting from output to impact, demonstrating value, and the challenges of being a design leader right now. Questions addressed: (01:00) “How does a good business fund design activity?” (09:28) “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role.” (12:43) “[How can] design influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact one?” (16:40) “How [can] a design team better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value that the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?” (26:34) “How can I help my team feel secure and supported when my own world is adrift on stormy seas,” and “How to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times.” Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse invite you on their journey as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And, as always, with me is Jesse James Garrett.  Jesse: Hello Peter. Peter: Hi, Jesse. So today as we enter a kind of summer hiatus, we thought we would take questions from listeners. We polled listeners across Twitter and LinkedIn and got a number of questions.  To start, thanks to everybody who offered a question, we read them all. We won’t be able to get to them all.  There were a set of questions that came in that were essentially around the idea of how to value design Lar Veale on Twitter asks us: “How does a good business fund design activity?” Jesse: Where does the money come from? Peter: This is one of those topics that when I think about understanding what’s really going on behind the scenes, one of those moments for design leaders, at least for some design leaders, is when they realize that finance runs everything.   Those design leaders have never been equipped to handle that conversation, but the budgets that they get, the headcount that they get, the resources that they get, all of that gets reduced to money. And that money is controlled by those folks over there in finance and in order for design to succeed, the design leader now needs to figure out how to bridge with finance. Jesse: Right. A whole new audience, a whole new language, a whole different set of things than the leader has ever had to engage with as a designer, most likely. Peter: When I read this question, I actually thought about a company that we are both familiar with. The funding model was an interesting one. They have a massive centralized product design team. And the funding for those designers comes from the different lines of business. And so even though the team is managed centrally, the money is contributed, essentially, in a decentralized fashion. And it led to what I considered to be the existential crisis of the design organization, which is a lack of control over how many people they hired and what they had those people work on, because a design leader needs to be able to make a decision around what are people working on, based on the priorities of the business as they understand it. But if your funding presupposes your headcount, you have now had a key lever of your decision making taken away from you. And then that further puts you in a subservient relationship to that line of business, because you’re basically their work for hire. Jesse: That’s an interesting take, because it suggests that if you can’t get close to the sources of funding, if you can’t get in a position of power around your funding, you’re never going to have the strategic influence as a design organization that you want to have, is that true? Peter: I think that’s true. But my ideal world is… Let’s say taking that example where you have different lines of business who all recognize that they need design. Instead of enabling this kind of transactional relationship between that line of business and design, now all those lines of business, somewhat blindly, maybe based on a percentage of their revenue, or percentage of their effort, or some algorithm separate from all of this, that line of business basically pays a tax to the centralized design function. And that goes into a big pool of money that is managed by this design function. The design team, then looking across the entire business, identifies what matters, what’s important, what are we going to act against, and figures out how to shape its teams and resources to deliver on what the whole business has deemed important. One of the things that you get with this, that is hard to do when you’re working in this transactional relationship, to answer your other point around being able to make a strategic impact, is that ability to work across the lines of business. Jesse: You know, I do think that there is a concrete value for businesses in having those purse strings controlled by product owners rather than by design organizations, because those are the people who are currently engaged at that peer level with each other to do that strategic coordination across your product lines. Unless you’re going to invest design with that responsibility, which really means in some ways elevating design above product management, you’re not going to get there. And so I’m curious about how you do get there.  So the question is, How does a good business fund design activity? What’s the best funding model for design that you’ve seen in your experience? Peter: The best model is essentially tied to general company growth. When I was at Groupon, we didn’t have lines of business that funded me or whatever. We had an understanding of how we wanted to grow as an organization, and there was an appreciation of what was needed from a product development standpoint, not just design, but product managers, engineering, data analysis, dev ops, all that kind of stuff. And design just kind of gets carried along with that growth. Now that ends up leading to ratios often, which is a heuristic for design funding. So if we’re going to hire eight engineers, we’re going to hire one designer. That kind of thing. And those ratios, I’m not against, but I’m not a huge fan of. I find that they are a proxy for understanding growth. What I’ve tried to do is, when you’re engaged in these headcount planning points in the second half of the year, you’re doing the planning for the next year and you understand what the strategic direction is, and thus what all the programs are. I then plan my designers against those programs, regardless of what other decisions are being made. If we’re going to engage in these five programs of work, well, I’m going to need 10 designers, roughly two per program. And that’s what I asked for.  What I’ve also learned is you always have to ask for twice as many resources as you actually think you need.  Jesse: The secret ratio. Peter: Yeah, well, you know, it’s negotiation.  When you start operating in these funding models, typical for any large enterprise, you’ve probably already lost the plot, because those funding models end up becoming very transactional and it doesn’t only affect design.  So you were talking about product management and others. What you’re starting to see is… lines of business. You have your line of business over there. And they’re responsible for P and L of a different business. And then separate from those lines of businesses are technology services. And so these UX designers say are part of a technology service that includes development, engineering, product owners, QA, and dev ops and all that kind of stuff. Jesse: So everything about product is construed as basically a service organization to the business. Peter: Exactly. These product development organizations, say they embrace agile at scale, maybe Scaled Agile.  The problem is baked into agile, baked into scrum. It assumes that that team has autonomy. But if that team is really in service to the line of business, they don’t have autonomy. They’re getting their requirements from outside of their bubble, from people who don’t actually understand what’s happening, but just have these expectations and that really puts the product owner in a difficult position.  This is one of those challenges, I think, product owners or product managers face that designers often don’t respect or understand—is how much of the decision making has been done before the product owner even starts their work. And they’re just expected to execute on a set of requirements that have been handed to them. One of my clients has been operating in this way and they’re starting to take people from the line of business and make them the product owners. You know, that’s one of those key distinctions between quote unquote tech, companies, your FAANG companies, and your legacy firms. In tech, those product owners, those product managers are the business there. It’s not a distinction between a line of business and a product.   In these legacy enterprises, you have lines of business and tech as these distinct entities within the business. And once you have that, you’ve basically already lost it. You’re done. You might as well go back to waterfall.  Jesse: Wow. that’s I think a bold statement. It’s interesting that you mentioned this just because we actually have an email here that is related to this, coincidentally. Marina writes in via email, “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role? They are merely order takers for a higher level of the company.”  And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. She’s sharing the frustration of being in the lead designer role and having to be the person who is chasing down the true meaning behind the requirements that they’re being handed, where the product owners can’t articulate it for them, because it’s not a conversation that they’ve even had with the people in the business that they’re engaging with. And so then it ends up falling, not on the lead designer, as much as it does on the design leader to reach out into those other parts of the business and start that engagement, but that’s challenging when, to your point about funding models, the funding model that you’ve been set up with creates a prejudice in people’s minds about the nature of the value that you deliver. There are all kinds of assumptions about your value that are built into how you are funded. And so when you’re engaging with these new parts, these organizations, when you’re diving deeper into the business to have these conversations about the true meaning of these requirements, it’s really hard to engage them in these strategic conversations, when their perception of you is colored by this funding model that puts you in a purely tactical service-oriented role. Peter: All of that is exactly right. To address Marina’s question, you know, these product owners, they may understand their role, they might be delivering their role. Their role is to execute on what the higher levels of the company have told them. So order-taking might be their role.  Now, that’s not what we believe is what product owners should be doing, in an ideal context. But that might be what they are expected to be doing in that specific context. And so this is no longer a design and delivery problem. This is a change management issue. You need to start working with your product peers and engineering peers and, developing arguments for why you should be working differently with those higher orders of the company. You need to help those higher orders of the company understand how they are constraining opportunity from square one with how they are behaving, and that if they want to realize greater potential, need to change how you all work together.  So, it’s not a straightforward design problem. It is this organization, process-oriented change management problem, that’s going to be really hard, it’s not going to be straightforward. It’s a quick thing to say, and it will take years, it will take literally years to deliver. Jesse: Yeah. Well, when framed that way, what I hear is a lot of politics and politics is a slow and messy business and anything that requires a lot of politics to bring about is not something that’s going to happen on a six-month timeline. It’s going to be 18 months to two years to lay the groundwork for that kind of change at that scale that you’re talking about. Music break Peter: I think we can connect this thread to another question, from Pavel Samsonov, who asks, “It’d be great to hear your thoughts on how designers can influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact-based one.” When I was working with Capital One, many years ago, I ended up talking a little bit with Aradhana Goel, who developed an approach to trying to address this funding model, to make it less directly transactional—“I give you money. You give me heads.” And instead, because her background was consulting, she was able to draw on that consulting practice and say, “You’re not giving me money for heads. You’re giving me money for results. And here’s my commitment to you. I will deliver this kind of impact through this work. So let’s have that agreement in terms of figuring out what are essentially metrics of our success that I am committing to in exchange for this money. And so you will give me that money. I will spend it as I see fit to deliver that impact. And that’s my commitment to you. And if I don’t deliver on that, you can hold me accountable.”  And so you change the conversation away from money for heads to money for results. And that’s, I think, essentially what Pavel was asking about. How do you frame it, not so that it’s about artifacts and outputs, but practice and impact. And the mechanism I’ve seen that works best, it still takes quite a fair bit of management in order to realize its success, but is, OKRs, objectives and key results. I had a boss, Jocelyn Mangan, she hired me at Snagajob, and she was a firm believer in OKRs. And OKRs done right focus an organization, not on output, but on impact. Key results should be about, How are we making an impact? Key results aren’t, “I shipped something, check.” Key results are “20% of people are engaged in a new activity” or, ”Revenues have gone up 35%,” or whatever, and you focus on those results and whatever it takes to get to those results, that’s up to the team to figure out. That might be a mechanism that you can introduce to shift that orientation away from output and towards outcomes. And if you’re looking for resources on that front, Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke is probably the best handbook for OKRs that I am familiar with. Jesse: It’s a good one. You highlight an interesting challenge in this, which is that in a lot of organizations, the way that design work is framed is not actually that much in the control of the design leader. That the way that the value is framed by the executive leadership of the organization is often filtered through the perception of design by your peers, particularly your peers in technology as, as you were talking about, design often ends up lashed to technology, as an enterprise level service in these organizations, then the models by which development and engineering are managed, then become the models that design inherits, because that’s what the executive leadership is used to consuming from their technology organization. It then entails a reframing of what a performance metric even is in some of these organizations, to bring about the kind of conversation that you’re talking about to shift that perception.  Peter: I like your use of the verb lashed, like somehow we’re kind of manacled or otherwise like literally bound to these technologies. So what you just said, I think connects, to Chris Jones, who sent us an email: “I’m curious how you would consult a design team to better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?”  This is part of why, a number of episodes ago, we talked as much as we did about charter-building and team definition. Design teams don’t do enough to define themselves, which means in the absence of that, they are defined by the others around them and those that preceded them. Unless a designer is a founder who is establishing a design practice, when the design practice is established, it’s established by a non-designer who has a set of expectations that are likely not as robust or sophisticated as we would hope. And so as design blooms within an organization, it needs to take that time to define itself in a fashion that’s distinct from the other parts of the organization.  I just did this with a product design team. And there were two aspects that I think are interesting in this regard. One is, and I’m biased towards this term, as you’ll see in a moment, one is we define the design team as essentially bearing the torch for humanism within product development. That recognition that there are people at the other end, those people lead messy lives, and it is the design team’s responsibility to make sure that what we build connects with the humanity that we are serving, because frankly, no one else in product development is in this organization. The product managers are primarily held responsible to revenue goals, and engineering is held responsible to software delivery. And so no one actually has that empathetic view of the customer. There’s an extractive view of the customer as a source, as a source of revenue, but not an empathetic view of the customer. And so let’s make explicit design exists to serve the customer in that way, because nobody else in this context is.   And then the other thing you can do is, be very clear in your measures of success, the value that you see yourself bringing. I think there’s some concern that designers, you know, don’t want to be held accountable. It’s like, no, here’s a set of metrics. Hold us accountable. Please hold us accountable. But hold us accountable to stuff that we think that matters, that we can now get others to agree matters. We’re happy to sign up for them. Yeah. So you have to make the time and effort to be explicit about defining design within your context yourselves, and not let others define it for you, or allow it to have happened through neglect or ignorance. Jesse: Yeah, you can’t just leave it out there and hope that it’s going to be all right. You have to take active control of the message about design and its value within the organization. And I think this comes back around to something that we’ve talked about in the past, which is honestly the need for a design leader, especially early on, to be something of a salesperson for design as a practice, more broadly, and not simply for the value that their team delivers, but the value of design itself. Peter: Yeah. Looking at Chris’s question again, I think it ties into Pavel’s. “How can I articulate the value the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?” And I think the way you do that is try to understand what does the company value. So in this instance that I was talking about before, the company valued revenue obviously, but, okay. So if that’s the highest order bit that the company is oriented on, well, then connect what you’re doing to revenue. Show how the efforts of your team will generate more revenue. Maybe reduce the bottom line. It shouldn’t be that hard to connect the efforts of design to those levers that the business is most interested in, you just have to do the work. When we did that ROI of design report a thousand years ago at Adaptive Path, we had this thing called the linking elephants. Where you connected a business problem with a desired behavior, you measure that behavior, you connect a value metric to that behavior, and then you identify a financial metric. And so you can say, if, you know, we did this for a financial services client, if we can get 20% of our existing customers to open one additional account, so you have a checking account, we want you to open a savings account, or we want you to have a credit card with us. So the desired behavior opening an account. And then there’s modeling there that should allow you to spreadsheet that out. But, it requires designers and design leaders to be willing to put on their business hat and work with spreadsheets, which is not something many are comfortable with. But if you want to make the kind of change that people are asking for in these questions, you now need to be part of that conversation. Jesse: I think that’s true. I will say also though, that models like the linking elephants model presumed that there is a trail to follow there. That it presumes that there is something concrete that you can nail down and name at every stage of that investigation into the underlying value of the work. But the truth is that that’s not always there. And sometimes the value that’s delivered really is not identifiable in as concrete away. And I think in cases like this, it becomes a question of culture, because the truth is that as much as we think of design as being unique in these organizations, in the sort of weirdness of design as a function, the truth is that most organizations have some functions for which the value and the impact are not tangible in this way. In these organizations, there will be a culture of decision making around how they measure the unmeasurable, how they qualify the unquantifiable, how they come to decisions about areas where there is value that they can perceive, but that value is intangible. And if you can figure out where the other intangible sources of value are in the organization, learn about the culture of how the organization makes decisions around those things, you can then start to leverage those patterns in how you make the case for the intangible value of design. Peter: My sense, based on the questions, is that these folks are in an environment where before they get to be culturally intangibly valuable, they need to be explicit and demonstrate some hard value first. I don’t think it’s an either/or, I think it’s a yes-and. Jesse: I think these questions do come into play to different degrees based on the maturity of the design organization within the larger organization that they’re a part of because yes, in the early days, there is going to be a lot of proving tactical value. Getting those delivery wins in order to start to gain more attention. But then having to push it toward that broader strategic holistic intangible impact conversation because you can’t rely on your executives to do it for you. Peter: That’s right. That is exactly right. My point was only that you can’t only pursue the cultural intangible. Jesse: Oh yeah. Yeah. Just, sometimes there is no trail of evidence to follow. Peter: Right. Yeah. If I think of engineering as really about building, maybe the challenge here is that there’s a building aspect of design, but then there’s the generative and creative aspects of design.  I think the challenge that we see within the world of quote design unquote, is that there are two components of it that are kind of represented by both sides of the double diamond. There’s design work that can be used in a strategic fashion that identifies opportunities, that’s generative and creative and harder to measure. That’s where you’re going to be more in the intangible. And then there’s the design work in the second diamond. And that’s much more about delivery, much more about production, much more about tweaking to realize incremental gains. Both are valuable, both are called design, but they’re really different parts of the value chain. They don’t think that that function that helps with delivery, you can take those same practices and generate that strategic understanding. In either way, design gets dismissed. Design, if seen as a delivery function, design is not brought in to help with the strategic kinds of questions. But if it’s seen as primarily strategic, then design is sometimes just seen as a bunch of hand-wavy management consultants who don’t really know what it takes deliver value in the very end. And it’s just like, we can’t win either way. Jesse: Right, yeah. I think that’s true. And I think that this leads to some of the confusion in the marketplace about what a UX role even entails. So we have these young people coming out of these UX programs and boot camps and so forth who think that they’re going to get to do soup to nuts UX out there in the world. And the roles that are available, you’re going to be kind of shunted to one side or another. Music break   Peter: So two questions that came in, both on Twitter, both addressed the challenges of being a design leader right now. Austin Govella asked about, “helping my team feel secure and supported when my own world is a drift on stormy seas,” and Joie Chung asked, “The main thing top of mind these days is maybe getting advice on how to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times, and especially keeping the morale up after dealing with layoffs of other teams and reorgs because of those layoffs. The key thing is there’s a lot of change and I can’t promise them there won’t be more.” Jesse: Hmm. Stormy seas. Peter: So we’ve got stormy seas, rocky times, its a lot of weather, and, nautical references. Jesse: Well, there’s a lot of weather for sure. Helping people hang in through layoffs and reorgs is tough. I think it puts everybody into a questioning mindset, and they start questioning things that are not actually up for grabs, but it can feel that way. It can feel like everything about a company is suddenly questionable when the leadership starts making these unexpected and rather dramatic moves. You know, this is where I come back to the stuff that I’ve been talking about all season, which is building emotionally resilient teams. And that has mostly to do with the people that you interact with every day and whether you feel like they are on your side and whether you feel like you are on theirs. And if you were feeling strong alignment with the people around you, and if you feel like you can show up honestly and vulnerably with what’s challenging you, and can feel supported by the people around you, that goes a long way, because you can’t actually promise as a design leader that there won’t be more change. You can’t promise that that change won’t be really very difficult for people. You can’t insulate them. You can’t keep them safe. Peter: You can’t promise that you’ll be there. A glib answer to this that I still think has some merit is, it is up to the leader, even in difficult times, rocky and stormy times, to maintain positivity. If we extend the nautical metaphor, to point the way forward towards calmer seas, to orient people on not getting stuck in this muck, but problem solving around how are we going to get to a more desirable outcome and how do we focus our energies now. Not on worrying about what’s happening around us, that we don’t have control over,  but on doing what we can on the things that we do have control over, to make progress and to chart that progress and to recognize the steps that you’re taking to move things forward, and even if it’s very near term or very seemingly minor, getting folks focused on those steps towards something better. Jesse: Yeah, I think that what you’re speaking to is a kind of a leveling up that the leader can do. To step back away from the immediate tactical churn of the moment and remind the team, if you’ve done charter work, as we’ve talked about on this show, then you have something to fall back on to talk about shared purpose. And if that charter seems to be in doubt in the current environment, then you have your own sense of purpose to fall back on. And this is something that I think is really critical for maintaining that positivity that you’re talking about, which I agree is absolutely essential, which is that you, as the leader, have to take care of yourself, you have to maintain your own resilience. You have to maintain your own ability to bounce back in the face of these things. And what that means is making sure that you are, even in the uncertainty, even in the doubt, even in the face of all of it, remembering for yourself, why you do what you do and giving yourself whatever space, whatever time, whatever ritual you need to maintain that connection for yourself so that you can show up for your team. Peter: Yeah, I… one) try to get plenty of sleep. I find that that has more impact on my personal mood than literally any other thing in my life. As you were talking, it reminded me of a leadership coach that I worked with through this former boss of mine through Jocelyn, she had an executive coach that she brought to work with all of her directs, including me. And this woman had a model that maybe you’re familiar with. I don’t know where she got it from, but it was this idea of the line. And there’s below the line and above the line, and below the line is that initial, emotional, visceral reaction that often is frightened, negative, worried, and her point is to acknowledge that which happens below the line, but don’t let that drive your behavior. Like sit with it, recognize it, work through it. But if you behave based on your below-the-line feelings, you are going to lash out. You are going to yell, you are going to engage in negative behaviors that bring others down. And so what you need to do is figure out, how do you get yourself above the line, into a more, progressive, positive, optimistic, forward-looking space, that’s still true to the concerns that you were feeling below the line, but now your response is more measured and is one of taking charge, of taking positive action, of problem solving, of, again, that kind of forward motion. So it’s not a simple reaction. Sometimes, it’s the simplest thing of, like, what we say to a five-year-old before they react: count to 10, take belly breaths.  Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What you’re talking about is behaving intentionally and not reflexively. And those reflexes don’t always look like a big lashing out or yelling at your team or anything like that. Those reflexes can also look like procrastination. They can also look like suddenly becoming really, really vague in your communications or avoiding particular people or particular conversations. There are lots of counterproductive reflexive habits that are driven by these emotional states that we find ourselves in, and yeah, there’s definitely a lot to leadership that involves simply being able to manage your own emotional states. And being able to process whatever comes up for you and to be able to hold yourself in non-judgment in the same ways that we’ve talked about holding others in non-judgment. In order to maintain, and this fear of trust and mutual support. First, you’ve gotta be able to give that support to yourself. Peter: Part of, I think, giving that support to yourself, whether it’s something you invest in directly, or your organization invests in for you, is recognition that you need your outlet, you can’t bottle this stuff up. You need a way to get this out.  I mean, this was something that Maria touched on when we spoke with her, which is at some point you get to a point where simply talking to your manager isn’t enough. They’re not going to be the ones to help you. And maybe, depending on your relationship with your manager, maybe you can be frank about the challenges you’re facing. You can, you can expose a little bit of that negativity upwards, because you need their help. You need some guidance.   Jesse: And a good leader should expect that, and be ready for it.  Peter: Exactly, exactly. So that they can then help you work through that. Maybe even just talk it out. Sometimes it’s one of those things, it’s like therapy. Just getting it out of your head and into the world or sharing that challenge with someone else makes you realize like you’re not alone in it. And that is enough to help you get from below the line to above the line. But then hopefully they have strategies for thinking about how to address whatever the specific situation is. If you don’t have that, that’s where you might need to find coaches, mentors, but it is incumbent upon you to identify people that you can turn to when things become difficult, or folks are just going to suffer with what you were just talking about, Jesse, in terms of kind of bringing it on themselves and kind of becomes this vicious cycle, even if it’s not aggressive, it might be, procrastinating or literally passive but it’s, it’s problematic.  Jesse: Yes, there are a million paths to self sabotage. Peter: How many have you taken?   Jesse: I’m, I’m, I’m trying to catch them all just like Pokemon. Uh, you and I, over the course of this first season of this show have often talked about the path of the leader as a fairly lonely one and a fairly isolating one and a fairly solitary one. And we often talk about what do you do when you’re the only one who can do the thing that needs to be done. And I think that what you point out is really essential for all leaders, which is not to stay alone. But to go find yourself a peer group and find some folks that you can turn to for support.   Peter: Right. I want to, refocus on a word that both Joie and Austin had, which was the word “secure,” and Joie asks how to help designers feel safe/secure. Austin asks, “helping my team feel secure and supported.” And I think… I’m not certain… I’m thinking through this… I’m not certain that it is the design leader’s job to provide security, particularly in the face of this rockines, if that security feels like a false promise, right?  You don’t want to mislead, and security might literally be misleading to your team. Here, that security would be, “Everything is going to be fine. You’re not going anywhere. You’ve got a good job. Do work and it will all be okay.” That might not be true. And you might know that might not be true. And so don’t provide a false sense of security if that’s not going to help your team actually do what they need to, to address whatever the situation is. Austin used the word “supported.” That, you can do. That is within your control. You can support your team a hundred percent and you should do everything you can to support your team. Get them the resources they need. Give them the time that they need, give them guidance around how to move forward in the ways we were talking about. Maybe it’s baby steps on project work, and just focus on what we do control and try to ignore what we don’t control to make your way through, Right?  So you can support them. But I don’t think you can help them feel secure. Their security is their responsibility. Through your supporting actions, through your nurturing actions, through your leadership and guidance, you are going to affect their security, but you cannot provide security. They are not your children.  Jesse: You can definitely undermine a sense of security through your choices. Peter: Well, right. And you will undermine that sense of security if you provide a false sense of security that then is not delivered on. As we discussed, then  they’ll just lose trust, and then all bets are off. So, what I would say is focus less on security and focus more on trust. And engage in behaviors that encourage your team to trust you. ‘Cause that’s about all you’re going to have control over, and one another, because that’s all your going to have control over.  Jesse: Yes.  Beautifully put.  Peter: Does that distinction make sense to you?  Jesse: Oh, yeah, that does make sense to me. Yeah, I actually don’t have anything to add to that. That was great. So with that, I think we ought to just say thank you to folks for sticking with us through these first 15 episodes. Peter: Yeah, this is 15, huh?  Wow. Before we go, I do want to shout out folks who sent us questions that we did not yet get to. This is going to be like Magic Mirror on Romper Room. I’m not going to give people’s full, I’m not going to give people’s full names. But Dan, Daniel, Shelby, Sharon: Jesse and I see you, we read you, we appreciate your questions. Some of those questions frankly are episodes in and of themselves. And we expect to get to them when we’re on the other side of this hiatus, we will not lose them, but we couldn’t get to it. Jesse: All good questions, some of them we were so confident we would come back to, we wanted to give them enough space. Peter: Exactly. Exactly. So with that, we are wrapping up another episode of Finding Our Way, and wrapping up what Jesse and I have referred to as this first season, this 15 episode chunk. We are taking some time off for the summer. And so… Jesse: Get out in the sunshine!  Peter: That’s right. get some vitamin D, limit our exposure to COVID and episodes should be be coming out again, sometime, we think in the late-ish August timeframe.  Jesse: Right around Labor Day, plus or minus.  Peter: Yeah. And so until then, we thank you for joining us on our journey, as we have been figuring out how we find our way through some of these challenges of design and design leadership. And just because we are not publishing doesn’t mean we’re not around, feel free to hit us up on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg.  You can find us through our website, https://findingourway.design/, where you can also find all of our episodes, transcripts of every episode, and then a contact form that we read. That’s where some of the questions that we have received came through. And until then have a great summer, take care of yourselves. Take care of those around you. And we look forward to further discussions in the future. Thank you, Jesse. Jesse: Finding our way.  Hidden Track Peter: [Singing] How many roads must a man walk down before he is a…  Jesse: Is the, this is the musical episode, finding our way. Peter: [Singing] A whole new world. Jesse: Peter, what are you doing? Peter: I’m singing. I had a, I had a double espresso, on top of my morning coffee, so I am good to go. Jesse: Oh man. Well, I should have been more prepared, I guess… Peter: You can… Jesse: I thought we were going to sort of take it easy here for the last… Peter: You can be yin to my yang. Jesse: Isn’t this where we came in?

In which Peter shares some of his Design Leadership Truisms (inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer), and Jesse reacts. The image that spurred the episode: Truisms discussed:“People are not their job titles.”“If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations.”“Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude.”“If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself.”“You cannot calculate an ROI for design.”“If you haven’t pissed someone off, you are not doing your job right.”“For someone who talks a lot about empathy. You show little for your colleagues.” “Introversion inhibits design’s ultimate impact.” Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. Jesse: So we were riffing on in email other things that we could talk about today and sort of almost in passing, you shared this image with me, which, is this a slide from one of your talks? Peter: Yeah. So, last October I spoke at the Design Leadership Summit and I gave my design leadership talk called “Coach, Diplomat, Champion, Architect:  The Four Archetypes of the Design Leader.” And when I first gave this talk, at the very end, I tacked on what I called “hard truths about design leadership,” and it was a series of statements. And I realized before this event, because this event was a little more homegrown, a little less polished, I felt I could play with it a bit more. I actually ended up pulling up those statements at the very beginning. And what I did was essentially a cold open, so I walk out on stage, you can see in this… there’s a YouTube video, I walk out on stage wearing all black. A black shirt, black pants. And the title slide says “Design Leadership Truisms, from mer-Holzer” because I’m trying, I’m playing on Jenny Holzer, and her work with truisms. And then I just state each of these truisms. And then the slide I gave you was all those truisms on one slide, just like, here’s everything that I just shared. And I ended up doing that as this preamble to my normal talk. Jesse: I love this. So, first of all, I definitely, when I was reading the slide, detected the Holzer-ian nature of it. Her work is something that I’ve admired for many, many years. And I think anybody who has read any amount of what I’ve done can detect a trend toward the aphoristic. Peter: Declarative aphoristic. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. The desire to reduce ideas down to their most potent and concise expression. And that is something that I’ve always admired about Jenny Holzer’s work as an artist as well. And so you sent me this thing, and that sounds awesome by the way, dressing all in black. I think it’s always a smart look.  And I just started reading a couple of them and I was like, I have opinions about these. And then I put it away. And I was like, I want to talk about these opinions later. So there were a couple of these that I’ve glanced at for a while… Peter: So is now later?  Jesse: Later has arrived, Yes. And I thought it would be fun for us to just read through them and talk about them and see how many we get through in the time that we have. And, maybe see if there are any of them where we have any particularly interesting reflections or points of contention.  Peter: Why don’t I read them?  Since I wrote them.  Jesse: Okay. In fact, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put the slide away, so I’m not looking at it. So I’m just listening to you read. Peter: Great. People are not their job titles. Jesse: Implicit in this, I sense, is the idea that you should not treat people like they are their job titles. Peter: Yes, basically, too often we are encouraged, particularly as managers, to reduce people to their job title and then swap people with the same job title and treat them the same, treat them interchangeably. And we need to engage with everybody as individuals. A job title should not define anyone. Jesse: Well, I think, especially when you’re talking about design roles, where the particular background, the particular creative strengths of the individual are going to very, very strongly influence the results that you get, I think that is definitely true.  I think there is a spectrum. That there are some roles that are more operational, that are processes that can be taught. But in the case where you are looking at people who are going to make a creative contribution to where the entire endeavor is going, in those cases, you do want to look more closely at the individuals and what they bring to the table.  So yeah. Yes. And yes. Peter: I’m not going to read them all. I’m realizing I’m going to skip a couple.  Jesse: You should definitely choose because there are too many.  Peter: If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations. Jesse: I’m going to say no to this one. I think that there are lots of ways in which a team’s work can go wrong. I also think expectation setting from leaders can go awry when the leaders themselves are not clear on what they want. So there’s knowing what you want and then there’s communicating it. And those are separate skills. Peter: Right. So that would be not setting clear expectations. Jesse: Okay. Fair. Peter: Behind this, is talking to design leaders who are frustrated by the quality of the work their team is producing, but then when you ask them what they have done to help people understand what is acceptable in terms of quality, you realize the answer is, “Nothing.” I’ve literally had conversations with design leaders who basically imply that they feel other people should read their minds as to what is an acceptable level of quality and deliver on that. Jesse: I hear that. And I definitely have seen that. And. I know that I have gotten impatient in the past with designers when I felt that I had to explain something to them that I felt they should already know about what constitutes quality in design, and that impatience for me came from an expectation that I wouldn’t have to be teaching as much as I found myself teaching in that role, in that context, in that moment, especially in the context of consulting work, where there was potentially not really enough time to teach skills along the way as we were trying to meet client deadlines.  So I think there’s an element in this of how much mentorship is the leader willing to take on, in bringing people along with understanding their expectations. And what do you do when that gap really does exist, when there is somebody who simply doesn’t understand the baseline thing that you thought you wouldn’t have to explain. Peter: There is no universal standard for quality when it comes to design.   So when I talk to these design leaders and I ask them, so how does someone deep within your team know what good looks like? And when they think about it, they respond, “Well, I guess that’s their manager helping them, like through direction or critique or review.”  So design quality, two things there. One, it becomes very localized, and so different managers with a different understanding of quality might be managing towards different quality within the same organization. And two, it’s largely folklore, it’s spoken. It is not codified, and that raises its own challenges. Because something that’s not codified can become quite arbitrary. It can change, and that’s not great.  One assumes that, if you are hiring someone, they know what they’re doing, right? You’ve gone through some process to vet their ability. And if they’re not doing good work too often, I find the design leader thinks that they don’t know good design. When in fact they don’t know what good design looks like in this environment or what is expected of them. Jesse: So definitely I hear in that, the trap of assuming that your standard is a universally held standard, that is therefore universally understood by your fellow professionals. Right? Peter: Right. I have a few elements here on this that are related to quality. Let me read the next one.  Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude. Jesse: So what you’re saying is a good designer can produce bad design if they are in the wrong context. And it seems to be letting the designer off the hook a little bit in terms of what they bring to the table. This seems to imply that individual performance issues are more often a sign of organizational dysfunction. Either that dysfunction exists at the level of recruiting and hiring, or it exists at the level of performance management and mentorship and skills development. Peter: If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself. Jesse: Hmm. I don’t think I believe that. In fact, I think that articulates a gap that I am trying to fill in my work, in that I think the quality arises out of high-trust, collaborative relationships and not out of organizational structures. Peter: I don’t disagree. I think I would place that as an organizational matter, the point of this being, design quality is often not addressed until you’re looking at output. When, in fact, what drives that output was heavily determined by a series of factors long preceding that output, that I am maybe broadly labeling is organizational, but I would also argue organizational as opposed to say procedural, or a matter of process. Jesse: Okay. So what is the distinction between organization and process in your view? Because I guess that those things are very much intertwined to me.  Peter: So I wrote a whole book on organization and never really addressed process, except for including the Double Diamond briefly. When we talk about design, we often talk about process—that’s a thing you can talk about ‘cause it’s set of activities, it’s a set of methods, it’s a shared understanding that we can bring to the conversation. What we often don’t talk about are the organizational factors behind the scenes that lay a foundation for the activities: how you recruit and hire, how you manage, how you mentor, how you grow, how you value, how you coordinate in relationship with one another within design, and how you coordinate In relationship between design and other functions. All of those things are the organizational matters. Your internal agency organization can be practicing user centered design. It’s just going to find itself highly constrained because all that user research is almost for naught because it’s not actually able to drive the upfront thinking because, organizationally, the designers aren’t in the right relationship with their peers, with the power to make that change. Jesse: I guess there were a few different ways to think about it. So, there is a football analogy that comes to mind, which is that you have the players on the field and the players are playing certain positions. And you have different ways you can line those players up according to those positions. And there are different positions you can deploy on the field, according to your needs. And so that feels like the organizational stuff. Who are the players on the field? What are the skills that I’m putting out there to accomplish my goal?  And then you’ve got process, which is the playbook. Once you get the players on the field, how do they interact with each other? How do they move in an organized way toward a goal?  And then you’ve got the people stuff at the individual level of the stuff that you’ve been talking about, recruiting and hiring and making sure that the guy that you have brought in as wide receiver is actually somebody who is suitable to be a wide receiver.  But I think there’s this other level, too, of team cohesion. And this is something that I’ve heard you talk about, about how the coordination, the orchestration of the individuals who are performing these roles in the context of this process and ensuring that they stay in sync with one another along the way. And that’s the rocky shoal that I’ve seen too many corporate ships run aground on. They got all the organizational stuff right. They got all the process stuff right. But no one was looking after the people. No one was looking after the relationships and it all fell apart along the way. Peter: Hmm, I guess I would say if you’re not looking after people and relationships, you’re not looking after the organizational stuff. You might be architecting an organization.   Jesse: I guess that’s the thing that I hear in this that I would push back against, is the architectural impulse to think that you can solve all of these problems, a priori, before any people show up in the door. Peter: Yes, that I believe. Part of my point is to shift the focus, though, away from process and even, again, individual aptitude, towards matters of organization. And I would include relationship within that, because as I see it, when you have an organization, you don’t only have the structure, but you have the connection between those elements and, yes, you could even look at that architecturally, but there’s a relationship there that I think matters and is part of what I intend when I talk about organization. Jesse: Okay. Well, thank you. That’s clarifying to me.I don’t know if I have a particularly narrow view of it, or if I have inherited a particularly narrow view of it from the things that I’ve read, but I tend to think of the organizational stuff, in terms of let’s figure out management reporting, performance management, incentive structures, that will ensure a certain quality of outcome. And I don’t think that stuff goes far enough. And I agree with you. I don’t think the process stuff goes far enough either. Peter: Well, and my sense is folks focus on that which they can get their hands around, and the structural organizational stuff is easier. But insufficient. It’s the same reason that one of the challenges that we have in delivering good designed experiences is we end up getting nudged towards delivering only on that which can be measured. Through monthly active users. And, how far down a funnel someone gets, et cetera, et cetera. And we lose sight of this stuff, which can’t be measured, but which is as important in terms of the nature and the quality of the experience. And that comes from a bunch of ineffable details that someone is having engaging with an experience. And the same thing happens with organizations where they over-focus on that which can be measured and modeled, and lose sight of the messy stuff that, as you’re pointing out, is kind of the beating heart of those organizations. Jesse: I think a corollary of this is the tendency of leaders, when they find themselves challenged by their circumstances, to fall back on those areas where they feel the most empowered, and often the areas where they feel the most empowered are the areas where they feel they have the most control, where they feel like they can dictate circumstances rather than be subjected to them. And so this is where you have leaders run into challenging times and declare it’s time for a reorg, and the team is like, great, this is another challenge on top of the challenges that we were already facing, because reorgs create just immense waves of chaos and confusion through organizations. But from the leadership perspective, it can feel like they’re taking control of the situation, when in fact all they’re doing is retreating to the things that they do feel some level of control over, because they don’t know what to do about the things that they don’t. Music break Peter:    You cannot calculate an ROI for design. Jesse: Ooh, I suspect that’s almost certainly true, but I’d love to hear your articulation of an argument for it. Peter: So in 2002, Adaptive Path attempted to unpack the notion of an ROI for design, an ROI for user experience.  What we found was that you couldn’t calculate an ROI for design because design is too integrated with too many other activities, that you can’t isolate design in any meaningful way. That said, what we saw was when you consider design as a lever for business value, when it was involved in the right conversations, when those activities of design were informing strategy, then those businesses both seemed to fare better, and the design teams were much happier, were much more engaged and did what was believed to be better work.  Jesse: I think a lot of this has to do with how UX design has always grown up in the shadow of engineering and engineering management practices and the strong cultural trend within engineering management to attempt to quantize and reduce the work to something that is measurable factory-like piecework. I mean, one of the most legendary pieces of writing in software engineering management is a book called The Mythical Man Month, which is about, in fact, how you can’t effectively quantize a lot of these things, because you can’t reduce software engineering to that kind of piecework. Software engineering management methods have adapted a lot in the time since that book was written, but there is still this desire that I see in waterfall and agile and everything that’s come since to try to squeeze the work down.  And design is even weirder. A very small amount of design can deliver a vastly disproportionate amount of value across an entire product in a way that the same chunk of development time can’t accomplish the same thing. And I think that is the disjunct between engineering management practices and design management practices that leads to these breakdowns that we see in these organizations. Peter: Totally. That’s exactly—… Peter:   If you haven’t pissed someone off, you are not doing your job right. Jesse: I think that’s true for as long as design leaders continue to be forced into the role of cultural change agents within organizations, for as long as we are continuing to have to fight for the voice of user research in strategic decisions. As long as we are having to continue to argue for experimentation and collaboration and iteration and adaptation in business strategy and design strategy and technology strategy, we are going to continue to be in this position of resident gadfly within organizations. My hope is that eventually we get to a place where we have more leaders who understand where we’re coming from, and we don’t have to piss as many people off in order to make our points. It’s an outstanding question for me, whether that is actually possible. Peter: Right. And there’s a kind of double-edge to this because, you’re talking mostly around a design leader, working with non-designers, and pissing them off as part of change. There’s also, if you haven’t pissed someone off within your team, you’re probably not doing something right. Jesse: Okay. This, I would like to hear more about.  Peter: Well, right? Because leadership requires making hard decisions and you’re taking a lot of different stuff from different people. But as the leader, you are the one with the authority to make a decision and set a direction. And that will likely go against somebody’s input that was delivered to you.  I’ve hired people over the objection of folks who were part of the process, because I felt that their contribution, while informative, was essentially misguided, and I had to make a hard call of who to hire between two candidates. And I made a call that ended up pissing some people off.  I could have either tried to make a more popular call, hiring the person who people were more aligned with, but I didn’t feel that was the right call. I could have tried to ameliorate, maybe, say, “Let’s not hire anyone.” Let me make a decision by not making a decision. that probably wouldn’t piss anybody off. They might not be happy about it, but they wouldn’t be angry about it. But instead, I made a decision that actively upset someone. I think too often design leaders, in trying to get along, in trying to make everybody happy within their team, either defers decisions, or doesn’t commit to hard decisions because they’re afraid that they’re going to make somebody on their team unhappy. Jesse: Yes, I think that’s a risk, but I think this goes against some of the things that you’ve been saying in terms of recruiting and hiring and bringing people into the team that you feel are strongly aligned with you as a leader, people who are strongly aligned with your values. If you, as a leader, are regularly making decisions that are pissing off your team, you don’t have the right people on your team. There’s some breakdown in alignment there between your intentions, your values, your perception of the problem, your perception of what’s needed for the solution, and the perspective of your team. And if you aren’t bridging that gap, you probably are working with the wrong people. Peter: That’s fair. I see what you’re saying. If in a group of eight, four or five folks are upset, then yes, you clearly have a misalignment. And if in that group of eight, one or two folks continue to be upset over many months, that’s, I think, the kind of misalignment that you’re talking about is likely happening.  If in that group of eight, over the course of a year, you try to never make anyone mad, so that what you value is not making anyone mad over making the right decision, that’s where the problem is. Jesse: Yeah. So I might flip this statement around and say, “If you’re never pissing anyone off, you’re probably doing something wrong.” Peter: Okay. That’s fair.   For someone who talks a lot about empathy. You show little for your colleagues. Jesse: Ooh. Yeah, I definitely feel this one. I’ve definitely seen this one a lot.  Peter: Have you done this one? Jesse: Oh, yes, I, yes, definitely. I, I have definitely fallen into the trap of the us versus them. The sense that we, as the designers, have some unique Batphone to heaven that communicates to us the absolute truth of things, and everybody else is misguided and in need of education and possibly angling against us.  And, yeah, I think that’s definitely a real risk, especially if you’re, if you are a design leader who has to fight against the cultural tides all the time to demonstrate that you belong at the table to prove the worth and the value of the work that your team is doing. If you are contending with that stuff all the time, this is a very easy mindset to fall into. Peter: Yeah, one of the things I say, both when I give this talk formally, and then it’s been coming up over and over again with this team definition work I’ve been doing with some design teams, is the phrase “assume good intentions.” And I think when we say it, we’re like, Oh yeah, of course. We’re all trying to do the right thing. And we’re engaging from wherever we’re coming from.  It’s easy to say, it’s harder to remember. Jesse: I think that’s a really important overarching point. In general, that generosity of spirit that I think is necessary to maintain the optimism that this work requires of design leaders. If you are going in every day with the attitude that the whole world is against you, it’s going to be hard for you to muster and maintain the positive energy required to motivate a team toward creating something new and valuable in the world. And I think that that is a lesson that really underlies so many of our relationships as leaders, whether they are relationships with the leaders above us in organizations, whether they are the relationships with our peers, whether they are the relationships with our teams to try to assume good intentions as much as possible, I think is essential.  Peter: Introversion inhibits design’s ultimate impact. Jesse: Oh man. We could do a whole episode about introversion because I think that introversion has become a fucked-up trap psychologically for creative people. And I think that people’s commitment to their identities as introverts is undermining their success broadly in the world. So, yes, I totally agree with this one. Peter: Wow. And here, I thought, as my favorite, highly introverted colleague,  that you… Jesse: Oh, yeah, but I’m a self-hating introvert. I think my own introversion is absolutely maladaptive and I actually have a lot of judgment toward other introverts. I think that introversion as a cultural identity provides a very safe way for introverts to run away from their own insecurities and interacting with other people. And it does them a disservice to allow them that escape. That’s pretty harsh. I know.  Peter: No, no, because, well, this is the one of the 25 that I actually heard back from more, probably than any other one, like, in the hallway or, you know, maybe on a Slack message.    Because, well, one) design as a profession tends towards introversion. Understandably, right? In order to be able to sit, often by yourself, for long periods of time producing work, that takes an introvert’s mindset and capacity. As you grow as a designer, at some point, introversion becomes a challenge. If you’re not able to speak up, if you’re not willing to put yourself out there, if you have trouble communicating your rationale, as you become a leader that introversion becomes this deficit. Because in order to lead, as we’ve said, you need to relate. You need to communicate, you need to put yourself out there. Introverts have a harder time of that. And what ends up happening, the reason for this phrase is, functions that are more extroverted–marketing functions, product manager functions–when you’re in those contexts where cross functions are getting together, it might be to do the work, but it might also be kind of an all hands and an evangelism moment, extroverts tend to dominate those spaces  Jesse: Yes. Peter: Product managers then grab the mic at the all hands and talk about the great work that their team has done. And the designers don’t see their design leader doing something similar. They don’t feel that the product manager represents them, even if their work supported the work that product manager was doing. But the design managers, if they’re an introvert, is, like, “Well, the product manager is speaking for the whole team,” or, “I just don’t, I don’t like, it feels fake to get up there and go rah rah, I’m a designer. I’m going to play it cool.” All that kind of stuff.  We probably should take an episode to dig into this because I want to be respectful of introverts. I work with them, I live with them. And as part of a desire to be big-tent, to accommodate all neurotypes of backgrounds and experiences, it’s not fair, for lack of a better word. It’s not fair that introverts are put in an uncomfortable position that in order for them to continue to succeed, they have to overcome this aspect of their personality now. But it’s also, at least in the current moment, real. Extroverts thrive in this professional environment in a way that introverts do not. And I’m mostly just trying to call attention to it. My hope was that in 5 to 10 years, we can figure out contexts in which introverts and extroverts can be their full selves as introverts and extroverts. And neither is advantaged.  What you said suggests that you might not feel that way, and that introverts need to get over themselves and their introversion.  Jesse: My perception, and this may be ungenerous, and it may be that my own status as an introvert qualifies me to make this assessment and maybe it doesn’t, but my perception is that most introversion comes down to a frankly, very childish, “I don’t wanna. I don’t want to have to explain my work to other people. I don’t want to have to figure out from moment to moment what somebody else is thinking of what I have to say. I don’t want to engage,” and that’s not productive and that’s not how humans get anywhere together as a species and this privileging of your own comfort over the success of your work is never going to serve you as a creative professional. So that’s my point of view. Peter: Kind of like we did when we wrapped up that one episode, talking about trust and realized that we had a lot more to get to. I have a feeling, I have a feeling that is true with this topic as well.  Well, we didn’t get through all the design leadership truisms. We probably got to about maybe a third, probably a quarter of them. So this can be… Jesse: We can do another round, maybe next season. Peter: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always you can find us out on the internet in various forms. On Twitter, I am @peterme. Jesse is @jjg. You can also find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/, where we have all the episodes posted, including with full transcripts, and there is a contact form that Jesse and I read everything that comes through. And that is how many people have reached out to us so far,  which has been great. We’ve had some interesting feedback, from folks through those means. So, yes, please reach out, let us know what you think. Give us ideas for future conversations. And until then, we hope that you are doing well on your journey as you continue finding your way. Jesse: Finding your way. Thanks Peter. 

In which Jesse and Peter discuss their relationship to systemic racism, as individuals, as leaders, and as members of the design and UX communities. Transcript Peter:  Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jessee welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett.  Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse. What are we going to talk about? Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, I think there’s an elephant in this room that is getting larger by the day. And, I think it would be useful… What we hear, what I have heard, what I have read from people of color about the conversations that need to happen about race in this country. One of the big things that I have heard is, “Don’t come talk to me about your racism. Go talk to each other about your racism.” So I think it would be great for us to talk to each other about race and how race has played out in our careers and how we see race playing out, all around us. But especially, you know, you and I are in a position where we have, quite a history of choices to interrogate as designers and as collaborators and as design leaders. And I think that all of those are topics worthy of exploration. Peter: I agree. The subject has come up with some of the people I work with, where, particularly, the white men don’t quite know how to navigate this conversation with their teams. They’re like us—they’re middle aged white dudes whose hearts are in the right place, but, almost don’t know where to begin. Which is frankly kind of where I am, okay, when it comes to this. I gave a presentation yesterday to UX Waterloo, a local IXDA chapter in Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour outside of Toronto. And during the Q and A, it came up, you know, basically asking, “What should we be doing during these strange times?” And, I don’t have a good answer beyond, “Listen” at this point, still, though. It’s probably time to start turning that corner from listening to acting. I’ve been thinking about how I could act, but then I allow myself to get distracted ‘cause it’s hard. And, there’s, you know, any number of things competing for my attention. And I choose to deal with the things that I feel like I have a handle on.  Earlier this week, I took part in San Francisco Design Week. Every one of their sessions has a link to the Inneract Project. I N N E R A C T, which is a cause to support bringing more Black and Brown folks into the design field, going into schooling and then supporting them all the way into joining the profession. So getting involved with Inneract, I actually signed up to conduct pseudo job interviews for early stage Black and Brown designers. Jesse: Like practice interviews for them to sharpen their skills. That’s awesome.  Peter: A link had come across, in one of the community Slacks I’m part of, and it was really easy to sign up and say, “Hey, I’ll do this.” And here’s the time. Those are small ways, but it’s not something I’ve really sat down to work through. I know that you are going through these coaching classes and are developing a toolkit or an approach to tackle and work through some more challenging stuff. And I’m wondering whether from that or stuff you’ve learned prior to that how you are thinking about this, what tools you have for yourself and perhaps for others you’re working with to ddress these challenges. Jesse: Yeah. This stuff intersects, in that the work that I’m doing is about how leaders show up day to day and how they navigate these more flexible, more fluid, more challenging kinds of situations. And this stuff actually started coming into play for me in my role at Capital One.  Peter: You say “this stuff,” specifically, matters of diversity and inclusion, racism. Yeah. Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, diversity and inclusion, I think, is the nice corporate frame that we put on what we’re actually talking about, which is systemic racism. Peter: Yeah, yeah. D & I became this initiative that we have a director of it. So we’re doing what we can… Jesse: Yeah. I mean, it’s an easy way for an organization to flag, you know, this is important to us. We’ve heard you. And so we have appointed a person, and I ended up as that person for the team that I was supporting. I was coaching the leaders of a group of teams that were all under one umbrella that was collectively about 80 people. And as coach to the leadership team, I was charged with thinking about, as we’ve talked about, these holistic systemic issues going on across the team that were impediments to the team success. And this bubbled up, it really was something that the staff took the leadership to task basically, and said, “We don’t feel like you guys are taking this seriously enough. We don’t feel like the answers that we’re getting are satisfactory, and we don’t feel like we’re seeing cultural change in the ways that we want to see,” in terms of, especially, whose voices got heard, how recognition happened, and then ultimately, obviously, how, power and authority get distributed in an environment like that. And the leadership turned to me and went, “Well, you’re our holistic systemic problem solver. Here’s one.” Peter: ”Can you, can you solve racism for us? Can you model it?” Jesse: Well, it wasn’t exactly that. It was like, we know that this is not how we want to show up as an organization, and, we want to be the vanguards of this change. We don’t want to wait around for somebody else to tell us how to create it or tell us at a corporate level what the official approach was going to be. We felt we needed to generate something of our own. And so we jumped in with both feet, and set out to create some safe spaces for these conversations to happen. And I would say we got very, very mixed results with that. In fact, I would say that the people of color on our team probably would say that “mixed results” is a generous assessment of how that went. Peter: What were the obstacles for, what were the barriers? Jesse: I think the major mistake that I made was not fully understanding what, creating these formalized structures, what position that put the people of color on the team in, in terms of having the spotlight put on them and their experiences in a way that they may or may not be ready or willing or eager to share, or the feeling that they are going to be put in the position of having to explain systemic racism to a room full of white people and that they are going to have all of this extra stuff put on them, this extra emotional burden of having to talk through their past traumas, Peter: Right. “It’s not bad enough that we’re subject to the systemic racism our entire lives. We now have to educate you about it.” Jesse: Right. And in an effort to create a sense that the leadership was actively engaged in this process, and actively engaged in listening, we had our leaders facilitate these conversations and our leaders did not have the skillset to facilitate these conversations, first of all. And secondly, we did not, I did not, really fully appreciate how the power dynamic in that room, when you have the leader facilitating the conversation, was going to skew things. And so, there were a couple of really fundamental misunderstandings that I had of what I was doing that led to that whole approach not working for us. Peter: Yeah, there are times when leaders should be playing the role of facilitator in an effort to quiet their voice and elevate others. And sometimes it’s the right solution. But I think when it’s charged, if there’s an emotional tenor to it, even if they try to be as dispassionate or blank as possible, just the fact that they are the leader colors this, and you need, probably, ideally someone who has almost no context, no agenda that they could be accused of falling back on. Jesse: Well, and I think part of the reason that I was tapped for that role was that I was not a leader of a team. So I was not in that same position, but I wasn’t facilitating sessions. But yeah, honestly, and this was the reason I had to get out of Capital One altogether, I was, at the end of the day, embedded in the power structure. And could not play that outsider role to the extent that I needed to in order to be successful as a coach. Peter: Right. Jesse: So what we did after that, then, was we went and got some help, and we hired a consulting group out of Oakland called Circle Up. And they do consulting and workshops around helping organizations have these kinds of difficult conversations. And they led us through a process that was very helpful and enlightening to us. And we were just starting the process of engaging with them to actually train up leaders, to have better facilitation skills around this stuff, at the time that I left the organization and handed that work off to others. Peter: Right. How do you get people to expose themselves? Candidly, honestly, frankly, in an environment like that, where even if it is a safe space, there’s a fair degree of risk. Whether you feel risk based on your employment status or just risk in terms of exposing your own ignorance. I have to imagine that no one is being open and honest in these conversations. Were you able to get there? Jesse: It’s challenging. It is tremendously challenging. It comes back to the stuff that we’ve been talking about actually, which is that when you have a high trust, high interpersonal connection environment, these kinds of conversations are easier. When you have people who are habitually, practicing things that we’ve talked about. Non-judgment. People who have practices of curiosity in their work. If these are your cultural values, then it’s going to be easier to get there, but still it is touchy stuff. But it’s too important not to do. And so I think that as leaders, we have to be willing to acknowledge what we don’t know and acknowledge that this is a problem that is not going to be solved in our lifetimes. And so we can’t ever craft what we as designers always want, which is that perfectly honed, eternally right solution. It is all satisficing what we’re doing right now. It is cobbling together little bits of things and making mistakes and learning from them. I do think that relationship as a frame is really important for this because when you talk about leaders as facilitators, what I’m thinking about are all of the relationships that that leader has with each individual in the room and how all of those dynamics get piled up on top of each other. And the effectiveness of that group environment in a lot of ways depends on How is the leader doing in their relationships with their people individually? And are there things that are unsaid in those relationships that have been bottled up waiting to come out? If that stuff is all there and then you ask that of people in a group environment it’s going to be really hard. So one question that I would put to leaders is how are you one-on-one’s going? Peter: So a project I’m about to start, there’s a leader who is extremely eager to get going and solve a problem and dive into the mechanics of solving the problem. And based on my initial assessment of the situation, I feel like the people who would be engaging in solving this problem, many of whom are direct reports of this leader, will not bring their full selves, if it starts with problem solving, and I’m like, “I need to have one-on-ones with all these individuals and try to get at some of the underlying stuff. ‘Cause I think there’s basically relationship stuff, relationship baggage, et cetera, that is affecting people’s abilities to act in their fullest. And if we don’t acknowledge the relationship stuff, yeah, we can kind of muddle along and talk about some solutions and probably, make things better, but the ultimate effectiveness will be blunted. And there are times, and this is one, where it’s not about great design. It’s about how we are engaging with one another. We have to resolve that and then we can get to the great design. But if we just start with, let’s just make design great, without acknowledging the underlying relationship stuff, you will never actually get to great design. Jesse: That’s right. That’s the premise of my whole everything I’m doing right now. Music break Peter: Something you said though, you’re talking about power dynamics. One of the things that has occurred to me, as we’ve had these conversations about leadership, and which has forced me to just think more intentionally and reflectively about leadership at all times, is that I don’t think many leaders recognize the responsibility that they take on as leaders. That their actions have all these knock-on follow-on consequences. They don’t receive it as a responsibility beyond, “Let’s make something great. Let’s get to the next place, I am leading us towards something.”  Jesse: It’s almost as, as if all of their sense of responsibility is directed upward in the organization, their responsibility to their leaders, rather than their responsibility downward toward their teams. Peter: Right, right. Yes. You know, there’s the line from Spider-man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize that the power they wield has these impacts on people throughout their organizations, intentional or otherwise, that they should be responsible for, but it’s not often seen as a responsibility. I think people assume to be a leader is to do good things, is to take us to good places, and through all of my actions, that is what will happen. And like, on all this stuff I ever hear about, or read about, or am thinking about, when it comes to leadership, there’s this lack of a recognition that your actions will affect people, and might affect people negatively. And that just doesn’t resonate. And I don’t know why we hold our leaders accountable, but we don’t hold them responsible, and… Jesse: They’re accountable when things go sideways, right? When a team blows up, because this stuff came into play in a bad way, then it’s like, “Oh, leader, you should’ve known.” But until that happens, the organization is happy to pretend that none of this stuff ever exists. And I think that you’ve hit on something really important, which is that leaders are not just there to perform and deliver. Leaders are cultural stewards for their organizations and have to cultivate cultures that do not harm the people who are in those organizations. Peter: That’s right. I think that’s exactly right. You know, in prior episodes we talked about the distinction between management and leadership. And I think with management, there’s this recognition, because you have direct reports and, part of your job is to grow your team, that management has a responsibility, in this way. But somehow we don’t use the same language or the same frame when we talk about leadership. But I think, to your point, successful leaders, because they are these cultural stewards, because they become models within the organization, often have a greater impact on these factors than the managers do. But again, they don’t see that as part of their responsibility. And something that I’m starting to come to terms with.  Another theme that’s emerging for me is that I want to discourage most people from embracing leadership, because not only is it hard, it has these outsized impacts that I think most people assuming leadership are not ready for. And are not aware of and are not cognizant of, and, because of that, it’s the baby with the gun. They’re wielding this influence and not doing so, appropriately. Jesse: Right. But, with these issues, I feel that an overabundance of caution represents a different kind of harm. Peter: Well, it’s a challenge that I feel personally. I am over-abundantly cautious when it comes to speaking about racism, systemic racism, my privilege. I will defer to, “Let’s listen to the Black and Brown folks.” ‘Cause what could I have to contribute as a middle aged white guy? And partly that’s true. I haven’t had those experiences. Idon’t want to take the stage away from others who are better suited to address it. But part of it is I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. I am abundantly cautious because I have had a career of speaking my mind, and getting into trouble often for it. But the trouble is around whether or not everyone is a designer or the trouble is around information architecture versus visual design, and subjects that were not truly charged in the same way that this is. And, a fear I have is that, with all good intentions, I will put my foot in it and get called out and I’ll get canceled or whatever, right? Because I’ll say the wrong thing. And that is what I’m seeing happening with some of the people I’m working with. Middle-aged white dudes running these sizable teams who are paralyzed when they’re at their all-hands. They’re just like, “Can I just have the person of color, who’s maybe one of my directors, talk now because that’s the right thing to do, right, is to make a space for them? Problem solved.”  ‘Cause they don’t know how to act or what to say, because they’re afraid if they say the wrong thing, now they’re going to get canceled in some way in their organization. Jesse: Congratulations. Welcome to leadership. Leadership entails stepping into unknown situations with uncertain outcomes and choosing a course and taking action. And it’s this lack of action from leadership that led to the diversity and inclusion initiative that I led at Capital One, that the staff were like, you guys all look like deer in the headlights here. That’s not enough for us. It’s not going to be enough for any leader to continue to show up that way.  If you want some credibility as a white guy, you have to be able to be honest with yourself about your privilege and I’m still working on this. I mean, it’s a path that never, I think, really ends, because it’s so deep and so layered and so complex. But, you and I are design leaders because of our privilege. I think I can confidently say that. Peter: I can’t dispute it, right? Like I, you know…  Jesse: Well, let’s talk about, let’s talk about UX as a whole and the early days of UX and the moment at which you and I were engaging with this work, what we did in diving into a new medium, trying to define an unknown field that no one had ever heard of, turning around and trying to sell that to people in power, convince them that it was something that was worth paying a lot of money for, even though you couldn’t go out and get a degree in it. There were no books on the topic until we started writing them. No person of color could have done anything like that. It would have been way too risky from the start. And they would have had enormous obstacles that you and I never faced in order to get to that place that we got to.  Peter: I’m, I’m, I don’t have anything much to say because I don’t, I don’t have anything much to add. I think, I think… Jesse: Tell me about your perspective, like, your experience, like, where has privilege played a role in your career, do you think? Peter: Well, it’s played a role in my entire life. I remember, it must have been an email ’cause I’m sure my dad wrote it to me. I was in my mid-twenties. Maybe I was living in New York or, after I moved back to San Francisco, and he wrote to me, “it’s great to be young, white, and have plastic,” meaning credit card, with the recognition that as a 24-year old white guy with a credit card, the world was my oyster. Society kind of existed essentially to enable me. And that phrase has stuck with me, because I have never feared materially. And, I’ve just kind of doubtless been buoyed along by privilege that I hadn’t even recognized.  And there were times when I, could pat myself on the back for certain career choices. My first full-time design job at Studio Archetype, men and women, roughly equal proportions, the senior, most leadership, the CEO is a man, but, like, women in leadership roles, women as executive creative directors. Studio Archetype was also, being in San Francisco, gender and sexual orientation equity as well, open out gay people in leadership, bringing their partners to work… Jesse: Studio Verso was the same way. Studio Verso had women in leadership, was led by a gay man. And we had several other queer folk, in leadership roles as well. So, yeah. Peter: Yeah. So I was like, “Look at me! I chose a career in a field that is like super open and super inclusive!” Pat myself on the back. And it was probably not until starting to go to conferences like the IA Summit, 2000, 2001, and you look around that room, and you see a lot of women, see a lot of men, you don’t see any black people or like two, and then that’s, that’s obviously not right. But I also didn’t do anything about it. I tended to figure, you know, what, we’re an open hearted, big hearted, liberal minded, touchy-feely community. It’ll work itself out. We’re not putting up the barriers. We’re not inhibiting anyone from joining our community.  Jesse: We’re just waiting for them to show up.  Peter: You know, it’s early, so, as the crank turns, and things evolve, I’m sure it’ll work itself out.  Narrator: it didn’t. You can get so daunted, the issues that we’re talking about obviously are deeply societally systemic, not even specific to the United States, though they’re probably greater here, but we’re seeing demonstrations around the world. And so the next question is what to do about that. Do I engage at a societal level? Do we engage in an industry level? Jesse: I think that, certainly, there are some of us that are wired for activism that want to be and have the motivation, the interest, the acumen, the wherewithal to be active change-makers at a societal level. And God bless those people cause we need them. We need lots of them. But there are lots of roles to play in this. And all of us, I think, have to continue to look at ourselves, continue to root out the racism in our own makeup. To notice when we are contributing toward these systemic effects.  Here’s a great example, actually. I was reflecting on my time at Adaptive Path and we did not have many people of color at Adaptive Path during its lifespan. We were much better on gender equity than we were on any other kind of equity within Adaptive Path.  But when I was at Adaptive Path, I hated the idea of myself as this creative director who was going to present all of the teams’ work to the client. And so one thing that I was always doing as a project team lead was orchestrating our client presentation so that everybody got to present their own work. So, everybody got practice in presenting. So the person who was closest to the work, had the opportunity to speak to it. And so if you knew that you were presenting the work, you were also thinking about, how you were going to talk through your ideas. And what that meant was I was sometimes putting very junior people in front of very senior people and telling them, “It’s okay, you’ve got this. It’s all good. I’ve got your back.” But I was not taking into account the way that these kinds of dynamics and the past histories that those designers brought to those experiences might have affected their ability to show up and be successful. I put some people in over their heads by not acknowledging the fact that their status changed the dynamic. It was not the same as me as a white guy, just showing up and presenting the idea, similar to the founder privilege that you were talking about a few episodes ago. Peter: I don’t have much to add apart from, looking back at Adaptive Path and, frankly, feeling a little ashamed at the lack of racial diversity. I’m trying to think if we had, I don’t know if we had any, at least in the design staff, Black or Brown folks, some of the administrative, back office folks, yes, but, our designers were largely white as the driven snow. And that’s been a challenge even since leaving Adaptive Path. I never until very recently made diversity and inclusion priority in my work. I would hope fairness in the process would lead to equity in the outcome. Jesse: Yeah. And that’s a trap that I think a lot of us fall into. I think it’s a very comfortable, safe thing to fall back on to say, “If my intentions are good and I stick to those intentions that everything is going to work out in the end.” And the existence of systemic racism is proof that that is false. Peter: Right, right, right, right. Totally. There’s two things I’ve learned, which are hard for me because the ways I’ve been successful in recruiting and hiring are: I have a big network. And I a nose for talent. And two things I have learned are, if you hire only in your network, you’re not going to provide access, you’re constraining access. And, if you rely on your intuition to guide you through choosing candidates, you are subject to your own bias. And, learning how to still tap into that, which allows me to succeed, but recognizing that I need to do it in the context of some of these structures that hopefully remove the bias that I bring to the situation. That has been a challenge. You know, I’ve gotten to appreciate bureaucratic HR recruiting and hiring approaches, which exists mostly to cover the ass of the corporation. But, done right, also should be providing fairness for candidates.  Jesse: Well, and I think that this is similar to the trust thing in that it’s something that can’t just be addressed at the level of systems and processes and all of the machinery that HR creates to try to prevent these outcomes from happening. It can’t just be about that. It also has to be about how you conduct the interviews, how you, as a leader, approach engaging with people of color. If you have a hard time engaging with people of color, you’re going to have a hard time leading them.  Peter: Right.  Jesse: And at some point you do, I think, just have to double down on it and say, this is going to be a priority.  Music break Jesse: So at Adaptive Path, years ago, we did an event which was not an event that I had programmed, but I was attending and at the end of the day, I was speaking to some attendees and they talked about the fact that every speaker on the stage that day had been a man. And I looked at the program and I was like, what happened here? And there were women speakers on the overall program, but they were later in the show. They were not on the opening day. And I was pretty angry, honestly, that we had not caught that. And at that point, going forward with the events that I programmed, I made gender equity on the stage of priority. Despite the fact that I had a series of event managers, all women, who would, complain about the ways in which I was slowing down the process and creating more work for them in seeking out that equity. I just felt it was necessary and worked very hard, for UX Week, for the last several years to create that, and got very good at patting myself on the back for it, and completely had my blinders on to the people of color issue. I would say, you know, it was great anytime we had managed to find a person of color to come speak. That was awesome. And, I was grateful to see it there, but I never prioritized it. It wasn’t until the final year of UX Week that, in conversation with some of the folks I was working with on the programming, that it became clear to me that this needed to level up to the same level of focus for us as a programming team. And that last UX Week, honestly, is the brownest panel I’ve ever seen at any user experience conference. Peter: Yes, definitely, thinking a little bit about Adaptive Path, I actually want to give a shout out to one of our co founders, Janice. So of the seven founders, one of them was Janice Fraser. Janice wrote one of the things that I’ve taken, probably, myself more away from, and maybe it’s as a white person speaking to another white person, she’s helping me think about how I’m showing up. And, so she wrote this post on LinkedIn, June 6th, and basically what she was able to recognize about herself, and I think this is true about me as well, is that it’s easy to try to come across as an ally. You say the right things. You put a Black Lives Matter icon on your Twitter feed and you use the hashtag. But to really commit, to really make the effort to de-center yourself in this conversation can be hard. And I think what she hits on is part of the reason about that is simply fear. She has a line here: “I was selfish because I was so, so very afraid.” And I, when I read that, that struck me to my core. I know I can be quite selfish in my practices. As a primary breadwinner in a household, I seek opportunities to speak, to write, to be exposed, as a way to support my business and thus support my family.  And there’s a selfishness to that, because, I’m afraid if I don’t continue to get speaking opportunities, my star will decline. The phone will stop ringing (no one actually calls me), the emails will stop coming in, and I’ll lose part of my livelihood. And, I can intellectualize that that is likely not true.  Jesse: Hmm.  Peter: I’m almost 50. I’ve got a moderately successful book. People will still pay attention to me. Yeah. People will still pay attention to me, but one of the things we have to overcome is that there seems to be a human condition, that your gain is my loss. There’s somewhere in our psyche, the zero-sum-ness. And I can occasionally find myself feeling that when I reach out to a conference organizer and say, “You’re programming your event. I would love to take part,” and they respond, “We have our fill of white dudes,” and I’m like, “But you didn’t reach out to me before you filled up with white dudes!” And I get it. I can intellectually understand it. And if I was in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing, much as the same way you discussed, in programming UX Week. But there’s limbic system, lizard brain, something core, that’s like, “I now feel threatened because I don’t have access to the things that I assumed I should have access to, that I’ve always had access to before. And now I don’t.” And that leads to a fear of relevance, legitimacy, and it’s something I need to overcome, to recognize that immediate gut response for what it is, and how to moderate it. And also, frankly, to be more generous, that’s something that I personally have a challenge with, is generosity. When I’m invited to speak on a panel, to not jump at the opportunity, but, instead to be, like, “You know what, let me introduce you to other people I know who don’t get those opportunities, who aren’t the first person reached out to when there’s an opening on a panel,” and let me encourage these organizers to consider them. And that’s a change I have to make. And maybe by saying it in this somewhat public forum, others can hold me accountable to that. Jesse: One thing that comes up on this topic of selfishness is the way that leaders behave when their power feels threatened in some way. And how that can lead them to kind of fall back on these shortcuts, try to hold onto that power, and not maintaining that level of awareness of how their choices are playing out around them.  I think that, like a lot of the other things that we’ve talked about, this has to be approached as both an organizational problem, and a problem at the level of leaders and their relationships and how they show up day-to-day. You have to be able to address it from both perspectives. Peter: I guess I don’t want to tell leaders what to do, ‘cause I don’t know what to do. But going back to that responsibility notion, leaders need to recognize, intentionally or unintentionally, how they show up has an impact, but like, doing nothing is not a strategy.  Being afraid and being aware that you’re afraid, you might think that you’re actually contributing by pulling back. and that’s not how we get through this. Nor is it, though, that you grabbed the mic and tell everybody what to do.  Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not one or the other. In fact, I think what you’ve touched on here is one of the most critical things, which is self-awareness. It’s like, how much are you paying attention towWhat you talked about, that gut instinct, that reflexive reaction that you have, and questioning it, interrogating it, challenging your own thoughts. You know, I grew up in the South. There is a raging racist asshole in my brain. I can hear that voice, and the more I listen for it, the more I hear it. And every time I hear it, I can go, okay, that can fuck off. And the more that I do that, yes, practicing that awareness, it’s just like, noticing if you’re meeting a new team for the first time and assuming that, Oh, the young woman at the end of the table, she’s probably the admin, right? Or the junior project manager. It’s exactly that same kind of thing. Only just extending that level of awareness to all of our interactions, in all of our lives, and noticing the places where we take those convenient shortcuts, noting the places where we fall back on what is easy, what is comfortable and noticing where we can change our attitudes, change our perspectives, change our approaches. Peter: So that about wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thank you for joining us on this journey. Jesse and I grappled with some pretty challenging issues, and not come to any specific resolution, but, I think, that speaks to there’s no easy solution. This is an ongoing process. And so we thank you for joining us as we think through it ourselves, and we’ll continue to do so.  As always, we are eager to hear what you have to say. You can find us through a number of ways. On Twitter, I am @peterme. Jesse is @jjg. You can also find us on our website, http://findingourway.design, use the contact form there. We continue to receive emails through that. We read all of them and appreciate all the questions and contributions that people are making. That about wraps it up. So again, thank you for listening and thank you, Jesse, for a good conversation, Jesse: Thanks, Peter.  Finding our Way.

In which we are joined by Maria Giudice, founder of Hot Studio, former design executive at Facebook and Autodesk, for a whirlwind discussion of her career, design leadership, and coaching. Topics: Frank Frazetta; Working Girl; art school; white designer dudes; New York in the mid-80s; Richard Saul Wurman telling us we’re all full of shit; designing guidebooks; command-and-control leadership style; San Francisco in the late 80s; becoming a design leader; hiring misfits; match between leader and the team; inheriting teams; the brutality of corporate America; learning from mistakes; change-making at scale; consulting vs in-house; the need for executive sponsorship; where we find joy in our lives; meaning and purpose in our work; leading and coaching in a fashion authentic to you; the value of coaching for senior leaders. Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast on design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And with me as always is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: And today we have a special guest, Maria Giudice. Maria: Hi, everybody. Peter. I’m so happy, you know how to pronounce my last name. Peter: I’ve known you for, has it been 25 years? 1997. And so, we’re excited to have you with us today. Maria, I think you’ve, as… as we were saying, have a lot of lived experience as a design leader… Maria: Yes we have… Peter: I also am interested in your experience with other design leaders, maybe even earlier in your career before you became one. So, you know, I want to kind of cede the floor to you to let you talk about yourself and how you would like to introduce yourself to, to our audience. Maria: So my journey, boy, it’s like if you look at it in terms of timeline, it’s a lot of years, but the good thing is I always feel like, because things are always changing, it feels like it’s a relatively short timeline in weird ways. Does that make sense? It’s sort of like, that’s the beauty of the industry that we’re in, that we have had the gift of constant change throughout the courses of our career.  Jesse: You can’t get bored, for sure. Maria: No, you can’t. So, but when I started out, I thought I was going to be a fine artist. My uncle was a pretty well known fantasy painter named Frank Frazetta, and some people right now who are hearing this… Peter: I bet Jesse had some of his posters in his dorm room… Jesse: I was not that guy, but I was friends with that guy. Maria: Yeah, exactly. Some of your people on your podcasts are like, their mind is blown right now, but most people on your podcast don’t know who he is, but some people it’s like, a secret code. If you know, Frank Frazetta’s work.  Jesse: If you have any visual memory of the classic poster of Arnold Schwartzenegger as Conan, the Barbarian, Frank Frazetta painted that poster. Maria: Yeah. So I grew up with a famous uncle who was a painter. And that just was like permission to want to be a fine artist as well. So I never thought of fine art as something that was a nice-to-have. I saw I had models early on that you could follow your dreams and make money doing those dreams. And in my senior year of college, I was taking design classes. And I was really struggling with design in general. I thought it was incredibly formulaic and I was like, “Ugh.”Iit was all about the Bauhaus, was all about like grids and white space and hierarchy and find a nice image and use Helvetica and wear black and be a white man. It was like, these are all the formulas of what it meant to be a designer. It wasn’t until my senior year when Richard Saul Wurman came in and gave a talk to our class. And did you guys ever see the movie Working Girl? With Melanie Griffith. Peter: I have not. Maria: You should look that up because I Peter: Melanie Griffith and, Sigourney, Sigourney Waver… Maria: Yes, I, I was that girl. I was that girl working from Staten Island. Yeah. I did not look like a typical designer. And so I grew up in the era of Vignelli and, Rudy de Harak and like these, the New York, Pushpin Studio. Yeah. Yeah. Milton Glaser. I grew up in that era and those were all men who had basically harems of people, peons, working for them. So first model of leadership, command and control. And it was really formal and you had to look and act a certain way. But then in my senior year, Richard Wurman walks into our class, who does not look like a designer. He’s short, he was overweight. He had a big scarf and he was cursing up a fucking storm. And I fell in love. I totally fell in love. That was like, Oh my God, this is the first person that doesn’t follow and conform to the norms of what typical design leadership was like. And he basically yelled at us. He basically said you’re all full of shit. And he talked about design being in service to others. And I’ve said this story over and over again. I don’t think he used those words, but this is my version of the story because It just hit me over the head. It was one of those moments in life that we all have, you can reflect back on it, where suddenly something gets hit on the head and you go in a different path. And that was a very seminal moment in my life where he said the right thing at the right time. And design started making sense to me. That my job, my purpose, was to help people navigate life through the lens of design. And I went to work for him. I graduated college and I worked for him designing guidebooks in New York City.  I started working with Richard in 1985 as a graphic designer, but it was really a human-centered designer. It’s that philosophy of thinking about who you’re serving and what is the appropriate way to deliver that content? What’s the appropriate medium, what’s the appropriate format, what’s the appropriate way to categorize information? It’s still the same stuff that we do today. It’s the same thinking process. Like, I have not deviated from my thinking process and the way I think about design since that lightning bolt struck me in the head in 1985. Peter: You mentioned the primary model you had seen was this command and control model. And then there was Richard, what was Richard’s approach to leadership? Was he… Maria: Command and control, too.  Peter: So he was a creative director. You were an extension of his brain. Maria: Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember. I’m rough around the edges. I’ve always been rough around the edges. I was really rough around the edges back then. ‘Cause I had the lack of experience and the nuance and I loved the way he saw the world and the way he looked at information at different lenses and different categories and different scales. I just was soaking that in.  That’s command and control style back in the day where you had a creative director and then you were his pair of hands. Right. And I would just argue with him constantly about the layouts, or I would give him alternative layouts. I would redesign the cover and he just would never, ever listen to me. And I just remember at one point sitting in his office, just crying and saying, “You know, why can’t you listen to me? Like, why can’t I have a point of view?” And he just dead-pan looked at me and he said, “Maria, I’m 50 years old,” I was like 25, “I’m 50 years old. Chances are, you are not going to change my opinion anytime soon.” Jesse: [Laughs].  Maria: I accidentally moved to California because he opened an office to redesign the Pacific Bell yellow pages, and I knew that if I didn’t get out of town, I was going to get fired, that, you know, like, our relationship was souring pretty fast, and just so happened that my girlfriend was moving to California and I was thinking, oh, I could do a road trip and hang out with her for six months. I had no intention of living in California. I didn’t even care about the yellow pages. I was just like, “Free road trip. I’m going to go.” And it was the best move of my life because I went and I worked with a small group of people who had to create the office, which became The Understanding Business. And it wasn’t until I had distance from Richard, where I had leverage. Peter: So, how long were you at The Understanding Business? Maria: I was there from 1987 to 1990, and by the end of the three years, I was a creative director with like 25 people reporting to me. Peter: So you were now a design leader. Maria: I was a design leader because I was in charge of maps and then it was like, I can’t do all the maps myself. So we started hiring people and then I became in charge of all the maps. And so suddenly I had a group of people working with me on maps and this is where I first discovered that I was really great at being a good leader.  Like, if I really am honest about myself, I used to throw great parties. I’m great at getting people together around some sort of purpose and I became really great at motivating and inspiring people to work really hard and believe and hit a high bar of quality. Peter: You felt, you demonstrated good design leadership. Were you operating as a command and control leader the way that you had seen and if not, what was your mode and how did you develop your leadership style? Maria: it was totally intuitive. It was really just maybe because I was not like most people. And I felt very intimidated when I was in college by not looking like a white male with good clothing. I felt very empathetic to other people who didn’t fit the format. I looked for the weirdos. I look for the edge cases. I looked for the misfits. I looked for people who really wanted to learn, had a voracious appetite to learn, had incredibly good, great design and production skills. I cultivated that and I really acted more as a coach and a teacher and collected good ideas. I never thought of myself as a great designer. I still don’t think I’m a great designer. I think I’m a really good designer. I think I have a great eye for design, but I don’t think that I’m the best designer. So because of that, I cultivated and looked for people who were better than me and I mined for the best ideas. And then we adopted the best ideas as a collective. So I really was very focused on the collective body of the people that worked for me.  Music break Jesse: I think there’s something in your story about the match between a leader and the people on the team. You talk about the way that you were seeking out the people who maybe didn’t quite fit the mold of what a traditional designer looked like, or maybe who didn’t come from the same kind of background. And I think that if you had inherited a team that was full of those more traditional graphic designer-type people, it would have been much more difficult for you to be successful as a design leader. So there was something about you also selecting for people that you could lead and bringing them into the team. Maria: Yes. Yes. I had the ability to continue to hire people that I wanted to work with. It wasn’t until I went to Facebook where I started inheriting people. And that’s a whole nother ball of wax when you have to inherit people. Peter: Well, let’s talk about that for a little… Maria: Yeah. Peter: ‘Cause you know, we have some similarities here, like you, Jesse, and I started a consulting business, doing design. We hired people we wanted to work with. We, I think, similarly had our flavors of misfits, which might be different than your flavors of misfits, but still certain misfit personalities. Maria: We all had our own brand of misfits. They all found their home in the misfit land of agencies. Peter: Something we’ve talked about before is inheriting teams. I’ve had to do it, after I left Adaptive Path. And, so I’m wondering, what your experience was when you inherited teams at Facebook and then I’m assuming again at Autodesk. Did you have to adopt or adapt your style or did you just try to get rid of as many of the people who were there as you could and bring in your own misfits, or, like, what’s your approach when it comes to inheriting teams? How has that worked for you, or did it not? Maria: Yeah, boy, I really struggled. I don’t know about you guys, but to go from like master of your own queendom to suddenly in corporate America where you have to fit into a system, that was a really rude awakening for me. But, I want to jump from Facebook to Autodesk because Autodesk was really interesting in that it was kind of brutal. And I think this happens a lot in corporate America, where I get hired, and I have to assume that this is the test of a lot of like C-level people. Or, you know, SVP level people. Right. I get hired in as VP of Design and I don’t have like a budget. I don’t have like staff. Peter: Are you the first VP of design they’ve ever had? Maria: Yeah, first VP and this is a company that’s rooted in traditional engineering thinking for 30-something years. And I just had an enlightened boss who wanted this change, and also Carl Bass is very creative. So I get in and they didn’t budget me in. Like in corporate America, right, they budget you, you get head count. So suddenly I get hired and I’m not in the plan. So, an SVP wanted to get rid of his design team. And so he gave me his design team, so basically they moved money from his over to my new org by giving me this design team. So he gives me this team, which has nothing to do with my mission. This is a product team and I’m in charge of weaving design throughout the company. My job was still unclear at that point. I had a three-month period to define my job, but they give me this group of people who didn’t fit any of the profiles that inevitably what I needed. So they gave me this team. Woohoo. I don’t have a plan for them. And this is the move. This is the perfect move, Maria. This is your head count. This is the budget you’re getting. In order for you to hire new people, you have to fire the people that you have. Jesse: Wow. Maria: Fucking brutal. Peter: So how do you approach that? Maria: And I didn’t even know who these people are. Right. But this is what they do when you’re a VP, they want to test you. Okay, let’s talk about, like corporate America, corporate America can be brutal at the top. So it’s like, okay, how tough is she? She’s going to lay people off.  It’s true. It’s the same way at Facebook. This is what I didn’t like about Facebook. Facebook considers it an act of strength when somebody is struggling, they feel like you are a strong leader, if you can get rid of the weak people, right? Peter: Up or out, is what I’ve heard.  Maria: And that’s true. You’re only as good as your weakest person. We all know that. But give people a chance to grow and succeed. What happens in corporate America, if you’re struggling, they put you on a PIP, right? Maybe you get “meets most” two or three times and you get put on a PIP. Right. But once you’re in “meets most” you’re basically feeling so unconfident, you’re feeling like you suck, you’re in the dog house when you’re in “meets most.” So your mindset is already in this really low point. And then it’s like, fuck you, corporate America, here’s the list of things you gotta do to pull yourself out. And if you don’t do it, we’re gonna push you out. And it’s a sign of strength when the leader can push those people out. It didn’t sit with my values. It doesn’t sit with my values. Peter: I hear you. I’ve inherited a few teams and, I’m not the only design leader who’s inherited a team and had either your boss tell you or your peers tell you, part of the job is going to have to be managing a couple of these people out that are underperforming. And you’re like, why, why did you wait–? Maria: Passing the buck to you, right. Passing the buck to you. Peter: But what I often found is that the designers that I inherited were often capable, but they had been put in a context that, that didn’t allow them to be a good designer. So it wasn’t about the designer. It was about the stuff surrounding them. Maria: Exactly. And that’s how I feel like you got to really unpack why somebody’s not doing well. Sometimes, it’s not a good skill match, but sometimes it’s because they had a shitty leader who, like, knocked them down. But in Facebook, if you don’t push that person out, you are considered weak. And it really killed me because I wanted to give those people time to. Evolve or if it wasn’t a good match, what is a better humane way to give them dignity and get them out on their own timeline?  Peter: Let’s rewind a bit then. You ran hot for, what, 15, almost 20 years? How long did it last? Maria: Over 15 years  Peter: 15 years. So you then had Richard Saul Wurman as a model, good or bad. Maria: Yes. Yeah. Good and bad.  Peter: Then you went out on your own (good or bad). Then you went out on your own and you were intuiting your way through design leadership and, and, I’m assuming largely self-taught.  And then, you know, Hot gets acquired at Facebook. You’re there for a couple of years. You’re at Autodesk for a couple years. You’ve clearly had some challenged experiences, but I’m wondering coming out of Autodesk, you know, those four to five years in corporate America, what did you learn that you were able to take away and actually grow from? Maria: Yeah. Great question, Peter, because, and, you know, my exit at Autodesk, wasn’t, like, lovely, right? I was kicking ass at Autodesk and making great change at scale. And then there was a change in leadership. Carl Bass steps down, my champion steps down, a new leader comes into place and basically tells me to my face that I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. He basically said, “We’re not ready for somebody like you. You’re Autodesk three years from now.” The things that I care about were not their priority.  Fair enough. But it hurt. But it gave me a lot of time to self reflect. Like, what are the lessons? What are the opportunities? What were the things that I did really well? What was the things I really fucked up because really, I was so ill-prepared for corporate America and I made so many mistakes. And then when I got to Autodesk, I was like, I’m not going to make those mistakes again. So I made a list of all the things I fucked up and I was like, don’t do those things at Autodesk, do the opposite. Right. But now, like two years at Autodesk, there was a whole bunch of things that I fucked up that I could reflect on. And so this got me really passionate about change-making at scale, that there are people like me who are entering companies at the VP level, they’re told that their job is X, but their job will really be Y. There’s no playbook for being that person. So I started getting curious and I started interviewing design leaders, VPs and above, and I’ve collected like 25-30 stories from people in all different industries. And now I’m ready to write a book on change-making at scale. I speak about it. It led to coaching. I want to bring these lessons to light so that somebody like me who is entering a new company could read, and better prepare for the change that will inevitably hit them. And so there’s tons of lessons there that I want to share, not only from my own life experience, but the people who are living it now. Jesse: I’m interested in this idea of change-making because I feel like for my entire career, I have been, and Peter has been in, you have been constantly driving change in one way or another. We’ve been a part of this wave of digital media and the internet and all of the evolution of user experience design that has sprung out of that.  And I find myself wondering, like, are we condemned to forever be change agents? Or does user experience design at least get to some place where somebody coming into an organization as a design leader no longer has to carry the assumption that they’re going to have to do a whole bunch of change-making work in order to be successful. Maria: Really depends on the maturity of the organization in terms of how they’re embracing design and human-centered design. Most companies, design is not part of the culture. Design is a new phenomenon that people are learning about and embracing and this was where I got very cavalier. It’s like, Oh yeah, I’ve worked for hundreds of companies over my 20 year tenure, working in an agency. It’s nothing like when you’re inside a company, because when we’re working in an agency, people are hiring us to do change. They know time is money, we like basically go in and have sex and leave. We don’t stay the night. We’re like, that was great. Get the clothes back on, go home, sleep in your own bed. Right. When you’re inside a company, you are living in the house   Music break Peter: I want to pursue one thread there. You were brought in by a CEO at Autodesk, Carl Bass, who recognized it. Maria: Yes. Peter: Now, most people are working at companies where the CEOs don’t get this. So do they have any hope or are they… Maria: Are they, are they fucked? Are they fucked? Peter: Are they, like, what is the opportunity for change when you don’t have the CEO providing some cover? Or, and how can you get this? How do you help a CEO understand… Maria: See, this is the thing, if you look up and you don’t see people who believe in your agenda, you are pushing water upstream. You need somebody at the high levels or you gotta look for those tradition holders, those people who’ve been in companies a long time who have some cache and power. And if they can believe in it and give you time.  If you look up and you don’t have somebody who believes in your mission, that is a huge red flag and it may not be worth your time. So you have to really decide, are you at the right place at the right time in your career? I’m an executive coach and I spent a lot of time helping people. Figure out that they have to quit their job. Peter: Oh, that one’s tough, right? ‘Cause we all need jobs. You know, when Jesse and I were younger and maverick and running Adaptive Path and we’d speak at conferences or hold our own events and we would talk about the glories of good UX practice and inevitably someone would raise their hand and say, “There’s no way I can make this happen in my company” or “How can I make this happen in my company, ‘cause conditions aren’t allowing it.” And I was the glib privileged white dude who was like, quit, get a job elsewhere. Maria: Yeah, I know. Yeah. That is a very privileged place to be. I always ask people, “Why do you have your job? What’s important to you. What brings you joy? How can you bring joy into your life?” Some people bring joy into life after they leave their job. Some people say, “There’s enough there for me to be interested and I’m going to go and leave. And I’m going to paint for three hours a night.” That’s valid. You have to find your purpose in life, and figure out what are the baseline ways that you need to survive.  So you can’t just say, “Look, you hate your job, quit it.” Some people can’t, okay? But then what are some other mechanisms that you can do to bring joy into your life? People might say, “That’s my job. My joy is my children.” And then I would ask, “How can you bring joy into your work life?” So that it’s not something that you hate going to, and I knew that I was not happy at Facebook because I was so happy when Friday came along and I was so miserable when Monday started.  Jesse: Telltale signs.  Maria: So I had to cope with being in a company that wasn’t really congruent with my values. Was it the right move? Absolutely. Was I prepared for it? No fucking way.  Jesse: Well, I think that we’re all looking for our right fit, right? Regardless of where you are in your career, whether you’re a designer or a leader, designers are looking for leaders who are going to be the right fit. Leaders are looking for people to join their teams who are the right fit. And they’re looking for larger organizations to be a part of that are the right fit.  Maria: Yeah. So you have to really weigh everything and you have to find the joy because life is short. Life is short. If you are waking up every day miserable, you have to figure out what do you need to change in order to bring some joy into your life, some purpose and meaning, and you might not get it from your job. And that is okay, but that means you have to get it somewhere else. Jesse: You mentioned meaning and purpose. And these are concepts that Peter and I have talked about a few times now, because in the coaching work that I do, I am trying to connect leaders with their own personal sense of purpose, because that is what energizes them to be able to connect other people with a sense of purpose, and galvanize a team. And although I agree with you that you gotta find your joy somewhere, I do feel that if you are doing work that is meaningless to you, that feels purposeless, even though you may be finding great joy in other parts of your life, that is eventually going to drag you down. The weight of that purposelessness. Maria: It will. When you talk about purpose, coming full circle, when I talked about how that lightning bolt hit, when Richard said “Design is about being in service to others,” it hit because that ultimately is my purpose in life. And thenmy intuitive leadership when I was running The Understanding Business as a creative director, it was congruent in my purpose in life, which was to be in service to others. Jesse: I think that you can find a sense of purpose in your work without it being the highest purpose in your life.  Maria: Yeah. I think that that’s fair. If you are going to a job and you are miserable, you really have to weigh the cost of that. You have to weigh what that is worth.  Peter: So another podcast I listen to, which I’m assuming neither of you do, is a podcast with sports coaches.  Maria: Hmm.  Peter: Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors and Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks. And it’s not about being a sports coach. They talk about coaching and leadership generally, and their own success. And one of the things that they have recognized in their own success is that there is no ideal for coaching or being a leader. That there are maybe principles that work and strategies that work, but neither of them became successful until they figured out how to be authentic to whom they are, right.  Steve Kerr talks about, he learned under Phil Jackson, who was Michael Jordan’s coach, Gregg Popovich, the coach of the Spurs. So he had models as great coaches, but Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich were very different people, but both successful. And he’s been successful as a third different type.  And I’m curious on both of you, ‘cause I’m not a formal coach, you guys are both formal coaches, but something that I suspect is that not enough leaders reflect on what is authentic to them. They might have models, they might have seen other types of leadership and just kind of adopt it as opposed to really stepping back and trying to figure out how do I lead authentically as me, even if that’s different than what I’ve seen succeed, but I can’t do what that person does. So how do I do what I do and still succeed?  Jesse: Yeah, it’s huge. I mean, the unlearning that people have to do. I’m trying to think of a good metaphor. It’s like the kid who shows up in a suit for the first day of school with the briefcase, they feel like there’s this way of being that is asked of them. I remember years ago having a conversation with somebody who was, running a small interactive agency and they were really entrenched in Jack Welch’s ideas from GE, and, like, he had this whole model, which was how he ran General Electric, another giant hundred year old company. And I’m like, you got like 20 people doing something very, very different, trying to emulate Jack Welch is not how you get successful at this, in this context. And it’s not even who you are. And the more that you try to be this thing that you aren’t, the more, you’re actually fucking up doing the thing that you think that thing is going to do for you. Maria: Yeah. You treat everything like a design process, right? I mean, when you were saying that, Jesse, I was thinking about our old clients that would come to us and say, Hey, we want to be like that… Everybody wanted to be like Apple, right?  Peter: Wes. I want to be the Apple of whatever I do. The Apple of… yeah… time-tracking software.  Maria: And your job is to be different than, not to be the same. Don’t shoot for parity. Right? So what is authentically you? So it actually comes back to design. I really do believe that you could treat everything like a design process. It’s collecting stories. And looking for patterns and then finding out the things that resonate with you that match your authenticity.  I took a short course on business, but most of it was research and then making it your own. So get intelligence about the domain and then pick the 10 to 20% that you need and figure out the rest based on your own authenticity. You know, I know a lot of people look at me now and they go, “Oh my God, Maria is so authentic.” You know, like, I love hearing that feedback, but it really started with just feeling like an outcast. I started out feeling really bad that I wasn’t the same. And then there was some point in my career where I went, this is design. The beauty about design is being different. Like back when I was competing against Adaptive Path and we were competing against Method and we were competing against Phoenix-Pop, most of those leaders were men. Most were men. And I realized. I’m a woman. Holy shit. I am different now. There were tons of pitches that I went on where they didn’t want to see a woman that’s when I sent Rajan in. I’ll stay in San Francisco, you stay in Silicon Valley. We can laugh about it now, but it’s kind of brutal.  Peter: No, it’s, it’s terrible, right? Yeah.  Maria: But at some point I doubled down on the difference and I realized, let’s celebrate our difference. So people can pick us for who we are, not parity. So being different is a gift. But on the journey, you don’t always feel that way. You feel like an outcast. Peter: I’m wondering, What exposure did you have to coaching, as you were a leader? You’ve been a coach, but were you coached? Maria: The first coach I ever had was at Facebook. Peter: So you didn’t, so all, all throughout Hot…  Maria: No. No, I had, I had peers like you where we would meet for drinks and share war stories and ask each other advice. That’s our coaching. We had peer coaching back in the day. A lot of people I coach now, they are looking to their bosses for inspiration and motivation. I’m like, look, when you get to a certain level, you’re not getting that from your boss. You have to pay for a coach. When you’re starting out your career, your manager becomes your coach. But as you move up the ladder, chances are, you’re going to report to somebody who’s not somebody who you’re going to learn from. So it’s just a reality. Or even if you do, you can get re-orged out of that person, right? There’s no guarantee that you’re going to find, keep, have somebody who can really help you grow. So coaching is super important as you get to a certain stage in your life. So I had a coach at Facebook and then I brought that coach in to Autodesk, but instead of me getting coached, I used the budget to coach my directs because I felt like it was important for them to have a different perspective.  But all of the things that I’ve learned in my life add up, they’re all ands, they’re not ors. All of these life experiences are ands. And that is the only good thing about getting older, by the way, that’s the only good thing. Your body breaks down. You’re closer to death, your hair’s turning white, your belly is getting bigger. But the thing that you gain is wisdom, and that is invaluable. And I love that. I love that I can now talk about my life experience with confidence. I couldn’t do that when I was in my twenties. Jesse: Excellent. Well, thank you for sharing so much of your life experience with us. Maria: It’s so much fun. I love you guys so much. You guys are so much fun. Peter: Well, that completes another episode of Finding Our Way. I want to thank, deeply, I want to thank you, Maria, for joining us, in this conversation and joining us on our journey. As always you can find me on Twitter @peterme, Jesse is @jjg, and our website is http://findingourway.design. Maria, come back. How can people find you? How do you like to be found, if at all, on the internet? Maria: Well, best way to reach me is through LinkedIn, Twitter and, there will be a new Hot Studio website emerging, in the next month or so, which talks about all of my coaching and workshop offerings. But in the meantime, you can just find my email there. Peter: Great. So feel free to reach out to any or all of us about anything we’ve discussed, during this conversation. And, we look forward to having you continue to join us as we continue finding our way. Maria: Whoo! Fun. Peter: So what has been your quarantine pastime or hobby? Maria: I’m painting and I’m getting back to doing some art, but not full time. I’m not ready to be like… an artist.  Peter: Have you, is this your first painting since like you left school, 30 years ago? Maria: I, I, it’s funny. I, when I left Autodesk last year, I, I, I said, I’m going to paint, I’m going to do an oil painting. I haven’t done that since I was like 17, so 40 years. So I made an oil painting and it turns out that next week I’m actually taking a three-day painting retreat with a friend of mine who’s a professional painter. He’s in Marin. Peter: You will be social distancing, right??  Maria: We will be socially distant, there’s only five of us, but he and I went to art school together and I’m tickled and I’m going, and I’m studying painting with him. Jesse: Wow. That’s wonderful.  Maria: Yeah. You have three days in Marin, outside in plain air. So we got to like stand with the easel and like an umbrella. And we got to paint what we see. Peter: Are you going to wear a beret? Do you wear it to the left or right? Maria: No beret. It’s gotta be like shade situations. So… Peter: Do you have a palette? I want this to be a stereotypical as possible… Maria: It’s going to be very stereotypical. It’s going to have, like, I have a palette, I got an easel. It’s like, have you ever like gone on a hike and seen people painting in plain air, I’m going to be that person. I’m going to be one of those people that you walk by and you look at them and go. Yeah. I’m gonna be one of those people. Peter: That sounds great. That sounds awesome.  Maria: Yeah.

In which we address the how to grow as a design leader when the opportunities thin out, and then take a hard turn and address the culture of marketing and the problems it poses for designers. Topics: Imbalance of leaders at different levels; don’t determine what’s interesting for someone else; the pace of career growth; designers who have found their way; discouraging people from desiring to be a leader because doing it right is fucking hard; dual-track leadership models; UX for marketing and product used to be the same; marketing design wants to work more like product design; brand beyond design; service design; marketing, as it’s commonly practiced, is bullshit; #notallmarketers; product marketing; data-driven marketing; functions have distinct cultures that cross-functional teams don’t address; Jesse’s hair. Transcript Peter: Welcome to another episode of Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse navigate their way through the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and, as always, joining me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse.  So this episode: the first 15 minutes or so we discuss the leadership plateau. This challenge that design leaders have as they grow in their organizations, they reach a point where it’s not clear how they can continue to grow and what to do about that. Then our conversation took a bit of a turn into the differences between design for marketing and design for product. We consider some ways forward, more holistically incorporating design for marketing and design for product in an overarching approach, looking at the entire end-to-end service experience. Peter: If you look at design leadership I think we have more people who could do VP design work then we have VP design roles. Whereas five years ago, there weren’t enough design leaders who could be design executives, you now have almost too many design leaders who could be design executives and where you have a shortage, an imbalance, is more at this director level. So you have this glut of opportunities and not enough people to do that work.  Jesse: And is that, do you feel like that’s just sort of an accident of history, or like that is a moment that we have passed through, are passing through, we’re going to move beyond? Or do you see this as being in the nature of this work, that there are always going to be not enough executive level positions to go around. Peter: I don’t think there are going to be enough executive level positions to go around for quite a while. I have to assume this is true of most functions. ‘Cause if you’re operating in a hierarchical organization, the way most of us are, you’ll have one VP, that one VP will have five directors reporting to them, so you get this pinch.  Something I’ve started to see, and I think we’re going to see more of it, is this recognition that design leaders don’t need to keep climbing the ladder in their career because there’s only so many places to go. Whereas I’ve witnessed people who have considered hiring design leaders, like it’s a VP of design of an 80 person team and they’re looking to hire a design director for one of their offices that would probably oversee about 20 folks. And they’re getting applications from people who have run teams of 150. This type of thing I think is going to continue to happen because there’s only so many true design leadership roles, of a certain level. And if you need a job and you are qualified to do the work, you very well will be like, “Hey, you know what, I’d be happy to run a team of 20, rather than be unemployed or rather than hold out for the rarer VP of design role.” And one of the issues I’ve seen in talking to leaders about this is the leader hiring for that director-level role is suspicious of a candidate who seems overqualified. And a piece of advice I actually gave this guy is, it is not your job to assume what they want better than they do. If they are applying for that role, take it at face value. Don’t speculate about their circumstances. If they say they want to get closer to the work, then assume they want to get closer to the work. If they say the size of the team doesn’t matter and they just want to do good work at a good company, don’t assume that it’s something other than that, I know I’ve actually been discounted or dismissed from opportunities where the hiring folks were just like, “Oh, this wouldn’t be interesting for you.” And I’m like, “Why are you determining what’s interesting for me?” I should get to make that determination. And instead, if I know full well what the role is, and I’m still invested and engaged, appreciate that. Don’t think you know more about the candidate than the candidate does. And I think a lot of hiring managers feel they know more about the person that they are bringing on than that person themselves. And that I think is a trap. Jesse: So that raises an interesting question for me, which is what pace of career growth, and I mean this in the sense of expanded responsibility, greater authority, more pay, moving on up in the world, career growth. What pace of career growth do you think is reasonable for designers and design leaders to expect and are those different between designers and design leaders? I find myself wondering if designers get accustomed to a certain pace of getting promotions, getting more authority, getting more responsibility, extending, expanding their skills in new directions. And then you get to design leadership and the cadence is different. The pace is different. You might be spending a longer time at each of these levels before you eventually make your way up to VP. Peter: I think that’s exactly right. A pretty common pattern is: you’re a junior designer for a couple of years, right out of school. Then you’re a mid-level designer for about three or four years. And then once you’ve hit your fifth or sixth year of being a designer, you’re now a senior designer, and the expectation is you’re in that role for a few years. From your fifth or sixth year to your ninth or 10th year at the most. And then it’s usually time to move on from being a senior designer that you either choose a management path or an individual contributor path. And then those stages after that are longer-lasting. You could be a manager for five to 10 years. You can be a director for five to 10 years. Such that you get to be a VP usually when you’ve had roughly 20 years experience. And I mean, there are VPs of design of much smaller teams and they might not have had as long a career.  A couple things to acknowledge here. Years experience is a correlate for this but should not be a determiner. Unfortunately, so many HR practices use years experience as an easy quantifiable metric by which they can screen people in or out of a role. And the other thing I’ve seen is, people move at their own pace. And some designers, after 20 some years, are still senior designers. Maybe they’re a lead, the next level above senior, and they’re perfectly happy.  As a design manager, one of the things I appreciate most within my team are those older designers who figured out what they wanted and what they wanted wasn’t to keep climbing the ladder, but to find a groove that they were happy with and that they just settled right in. And they did really good work. It’s not like they were resting on their laurels. It’s not like they had given up. They’re just like, “You know what? I want to do this job. And, I’m fine that I’m not earning more money, that I’m not giving more responsibility because I’m happy.”  And so many other designers, I think, especially those who continue to climb the ladder, which probably means you have a bit of ambition, a bit of ego, a bit of that desire. Those leaders look at someone who’s found their groove, and are kind of suspicious. Like, “There must be something wrong with you if you don’t have the kind of ambition I do.” And that’s not true, that’s just a different mindset, a different personality. Jesse:  When you talk about this archetype of the designer, who knows what they want, I’m reminded of our old friend and former colleague Tim Gasperak, and a conversation that I had with Tim as he was parting ways from Adaptive Path many years ago. And he was very clear. He was like, you know what? This is the kind of team in which I know I can be successful. And this is the kind of environment in which I can be an effective leader and Adaptive Path at that point was turning into something that he could see was not for him. And I really appreciated his clarity about that and not, just mindlessly seeking additional opportunities within a system that wasn’t the right fit for him. Peter: Yeah. Where, for me, it really crystallized was when I was leading design at Groupon and. We were building out our Chicago team. And there was a guy who was my age, our age, he’d been doing this type of work at that point for 20 some years. And at the company he was working for, he had been put into a manager role almost against his will, but because there was no one else around to do the work, and he was the senior most person on the team. And when we were able to offer him a straightforward senior interaction designer roll, a product designer role. He was so grateful that there was a place that he go and focus on the work. Not manage people, not be seen as some galvanizing leader, just someone who’s like really into the craft of design, wants to do good interaction design work, but also wants to work eight hours a day. Had his family, had his life. Wasn’t a striver and that was just a personality type. And he was by far and away the most well adjusted person on the team, because, probably because he’d had this experience and maybe Tim had this as well. He had an experience where he realized like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” Maybe you don’t realize it until you’ve done it. And you’re like, “Oh, okay. I need to back off from that.” I guess my point to all of this is 1) don’t assume that you know other people’s conditions better than your own, like, take people at their face value. And 2) don’t assume that everyone else has the same drive and motivation that you do. We’re all differently wired or inclined. And that’s great. And your role as a manager or a leader is to respect and recognize that, not try to mold and shape people all into a set of similar strivers. Jesse: I think on the part of some of these very senior skilled people there is a question of whether this individual contributor path is going to be enough. Is it going to give them enough authority? Is it going to give them enough autonomy, to be able to actually grow into leadership from that perspective. I think that a lot of senior designers feel like in order to become leaders, they have to become managers and that the power structures that they’re a part of in fact favor the managers over the individual contributor leaders in a lot of the organizations that I’ve seen. Peter: I think it is generally true that organizations find their leadership from those who manage, even in an organization that has dual track career ladders, where you can become a more senior IC or a manager, if you find you’re really wanting to have that influence and authority, there is a nudge towards management. That said, one of the things that I’m realizing, I hope our podcast can do, and it’s actually an unstated desire of my design leadership talks and workshops, is to subtly, and now I’m being unsubtle…. Jesse: Yeah, I don’t know how subtle you can call it anymore. Peter: …is to subtly discourage people from desiring to be a leader if you’re not ready for it, because leadership is fucking hard. And I think too many people feel that leadership is just the next step on the ladder. It’s the next thing that I should be doing. There’s, again, this societal or professional pressure to grow into these leader roles, but to do leadership right is hard. But if you’re going to be a leader, it is incumbent upon you to be a good leader because now you’re responsible for so many more people other than yourself. You have to take it seriously. And I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize what they’re getting into. They don’t approach the leadership aspects of their role with the seriousness or gravity that it’s warranted. And that’s bad, that’s harmful. I would rather folks who are not willing to sign up for the pain-in-the-ass that is true leadership to recognize, like, “You know what, I’m out. I don’t need to be a leader.” Like this guy that I was referring to earlier. “I’m happy being a really strong contributor. Maybe I’m not going to make as much money, but you can still make pretty good money.”  I think fundamentally much of what we’re talking about is wrapped up in capitalism and the challenges that we face in terms of needing to work in order to survive as a society, but separating some of that, you can make good money as a senior designer that is still primarily a contributor and not bear the psychological burden of real leadership. We should encourage folks to not feel compelled, to keep growing in that progressive way and adopt leadership modes. There is something that I have seen happen in certain firms where they do have dual-track career growth, where you can be a manager and then a director, and then a VP, or you can be a lead designer, and a principal designer, and even like a distinguished designer. Sometimes what happens in those environments is the management track becomes seen as all you’re doing is people management as you elevate. And that actually is seen as less strategic and less value-add, within the organization. Jesse: It becomes almost like an administrative function. Peter: Exactly. The language I heard– There was one company I did some consulting for where they had this dual-track model and the people who were these design directors, they would have 10 to 15 people in their organizations. They felt that they were seen, essentially, this was their language, as babysitters. Their job is to nurture and care for the humans.  And then they had a peer who, the role was, I think, a design architect, and those folks were the strategic and creative leaders and all of the energy outside of the design team, in terms of that cross-functional engagement was focused on the design architect. So your engineering peers, your product management peers, the executives. Because the design architect is the one talking about the strategic and creative problems in play. They’re getting all the attention and the design director who is running the team of all the people who are ultimately delivering this work is set aside because they’re not seen as strategic. So there’s a risk there, that you turn your management class into, yeah, some form of admin and not someone who is also respected for their ability to lead a group towards delivering valuable solutions. Music break Design for Marketing vs Design for Product Jesse: In more traditional marketing, branding, advertising agency environments, these strong high level performers are, I think, culturally more elevated because these are the workhorses of those companies as businesses. It’s your really super-skilled video editors and graphic designers and copywriters that can drive the creation of these highly polished artifacts, that is the basis of your business. And, so I’m curious about, how contextual this is in terms of the elevation of the individual contributor versus the elevation of the manager, depending on what business you’re in and what you’re delivering. Peter: One of the companies I’m working with, right now I’m supporting their recruiting and hiring efforts. And they’ve been looking for design directors. And one of the people we were introduced to was someone who had predominantly a marketing background, and the design director role that I was recruiting for was going to have management as its primary function. This was going to be someone responsible for a team of 10 to 20 folks. There was going to be a lot of care and feeding and nurturing of that team. There was going to be recruiting and hiring that they were going to have to do in building out the team. So I’m interviewing this guy, and it was interesting to me because he was coming at this from a background in marketing and creative. When I would ask him questions, he would always respond with experiences that he had in doing project work, and his stories were not about leading user experience teams. It was about delivering user experience work, and he never talked about his teams. He never talked– I couldn’t get him to talk about recruiting and hiring. Like, I didn’t want to lead him as a witness, right? I was trying to get a sense of where his head was, but I gave him many opportunities to talk about recruiting and hiring, to talk about building a team, to talk about coaching others and bringing them up. And he was clearly just– it didn’t occur to him that that was the thing to do. What occurred to him was I created deliverables for a client and that was my value. And it struck me just how, to the point you were just making, this cultural distinction between design for marketing and traditional creative and design for product and user experience. And, it became clear to me that this gentleman was not going to be a fit for what we needed, because of this cultural difference. And I’m one who’s usually pretty accommodating of different backgrounds and perspectives, but there was a chasm that was just going to be too wide to cross here, in order for this person to succeed in the organization I was trying to recruit for. Jesse: How separate do you think those worlds are at this point? Years ago, when all of this was getting started, there was a sense that these practices might not be that different. That UX was going to be UX was going to be UX, regardless of the context in which it was practiced. And since then, I think that we have seen a stronger divide between marketing, branding, content-oriented UX versus product UX, and those cultures and practices, I think, have been diverging for a little while now, maybe the last 10 years or so. Peter: I have… Jesse: And it used to be that a lot of people would go back and forth between them. Now, a lot of people had these resumes that were a mix of different kinds of UX work, and I don’t know how much that’s happening anymore. Peter: Wow. Okay. I feel like I’m about to go for five to eight minutes.  Jesse: Great. Peter: Well, so. When Adaptive Path started, our work was primarily in support of marketing user experience: big, hairy websites that needed help figuring out their structure to be more understandable to potential customers. And we always wanted to do the product side, what happened once you logged in, but there just wasn’t as much demand for that. Marketing had budgets for user experience in a way that product teams at that time, in 2001, 2002, did not have budgets for user experience.  Jesse: Right.  Peter: What our experience was at Adaptive Path is exactly what you said. We were able to use basically the same methods for doing marketing UX as we did for doing product UX. And I think we were quite successful. That said, there has been a bifurcation. I mean, it’s basically the split in your Elements diagram, right, right down the middle. Jesse: [Laughs] Peter: There’s been a bifurcation… Jesse: You got me. Peter: …possibly less in practice, but definitely in culture. In the last year, I’ve really felt a certain, almost upheaval about this. Because I think marketing design teams are frustrated. Marketing design teams, I believe, would love to work more like what they see happening on product design teams, but the internal partners that brand and marketing designers have are marketers and the marketing mindset is built around campaigns. It’s built around launches. It’s built around days, weeks, and months primarily. Whereas I think the product mindset is built around weeks, months, quarters. The timeframe tends to be different. So marketing design teams tend to be turning around work much faster. They don’t get to dig in the way that product design teams get to. And it’s a frustration on their part. I’ve been working with some marketing design teams over the last five or six months, and they don’t like being on this hamster wheel they don’t quite know how to get off because that is the set of expectations.  Whereas the product designers, there’s just this recognition that software takes longer, and that there’s a certain complexity to software that requires upfront deeper thinking. The research and the modeling and the understanding of the problem before you can then start building the experiences to deliver on it. Whereas marketing is not seen as a similarly complicated space to grapple with. But what I’m starting to hear more from one of my consulting clients right now, I have been working with both the brand design team and the product design team, but separately, right. Brand design reports up through marketing, product design reports up through product. But I’ve heard from both design teams that they want to be working together and that they want to coordinate their efforts and there’s actually been some conspiratorial thinking that the higher levels of the organization are trying to keep these two teams down by keeping them separated, which I don’t believe to be the case. I think this is simply an artifact of decades of design practice. But I think in terms of this convulsion, a different brand design team that I’m working with is trying to figure out how they push beyond brand design, to being essentially the brand ambassadors for the organization. And with this recognition that in order to deliver a brand experience, it’s not just around events production and marketing design and video testimonials and all the things that a brand design team works on. It’s about helping the frontline be better. Engage better with their customers, because that is a brand touchpoint. Or the customer service people, the salespeople, all those folks who represent the company. Our reps are thus representing the company’s brand. And the leadership of this brand design team wants to have an influence there, and they don’t quite know how to get there, but they recognize that their ultimate impact is limited, until they are able to have that influence.  And that for me is the sign that this is a team that’s trying to solve that brand problem, that is as, if not more, complicated than the product design problems that we’re talking about. Jesse: When you start talking about orchestrating brand identity and brand attributes across these multiple touchpoints, at that point, you are starting to talk about service design practice. So I can definitely see where these things are colliding. I think that part of this bifurcation that you’re talking about has to do with how the value of design is construed by the partners that you’re working with, that when you’re engaged in this marketing branding context, there is a certain set of assumptions about what design is bringing to the table that nudge you toward that project orientation, that delivery orientation. And you talked about the early days of Adaptive Path and the work that we did as we were straddling the marketing and product spaces and we did a lot of marketing work early on because that’s where the value was being recognized. The value of design as a contributor to product development had not yet been recognized to the same degree. That recognition then came, but their perception of the value of design was different from the perception of the value of design that our marketing oriented clients had. And they were asking for different things as a result of putting the emphasis on different things. So there would be more emphasis on the more user modeling and requirements development kind of stuff than we would see from our marketing clients, because the way that product owners saw our value was fundamentally different. Peter: We ran away from marketing as fast as we could at Adaptive Path. The moment we didn’t have to take on marketing jobs anymore, we were happy. And I think there is a challenge in corporations, corporate America, at least. Marketing as it has been commonly practiced, particularly around marketing communications, is largely bullshit. It’s, it’s, it’s not well considered. It’s not intellectual. It’s not thought through. It’s, “We’ve always done it like this. So let’s just keeping doing it like this.” It’s throwing shit against the wall and hoping something sticks. And the people who are in leadership roles gravitating towards marketing are often not the sharpest knives in the drawer and they’re not people that I want to be partnering with. And this is, I’m just putting this out there. Right. I’m, I’m gonna piss off a bunch of folks and I’m sure #notallmarketers. But there is a problem in companies that marketing is often handled by folks who are not tackling these problems with the level of depth and rigor that it is due. And I think marketing over time has kind of trifurcated–you have marketing communications, you have product marketing, and now you have, what is this newest form of marketing, kind of a growth marketing, like a data driven marketing, let’s call it that. And one of the challenges with marketing is marketing hasn’t figured out what it is. After 20 years of the 21st century, it’s confused. And the companies who get it best are setting marcomm aside and focusing on the data-driven marketing, because they actually can see there is a degree of thought and rigor that is happening there.  Product marketing is an interesting one because, 30 or 40 years ago, the design work that you and I do, that client would have been the product marketers. Product marketers were responsible for understanding their audience, modeling the audience, and then figuring out what you create in order to serve that market. That was product marketing. And something happened over the last 30 or 40 years where that part of marketing withered away. There’s bits and pieces of it. You see it more in enterprise software companies than consumer focused companies, but it’s not what it once was. I think there’s an interesting opportunity for product marketing to be reborn. I have found in over the last few years, some of my best advocates for what I was trying to do within an organization were product marketers. These folks who we’re trying to get the right thing done, but they’re not marcomm, they’re not, these data-driven marketers, they’re sitting in the middle. One of the things that’s happened is with “agile transformations,” you get these highly atomized product delivery teams. And one of the unfortunate byproducts of that is there is no holistic view of the customer anymore, except potentially with product marketers, if you have them, they were still around. They have this view, there was one client I was working with where the product marketers, they literally said our reason for being is to be the voice of the customer within this organization, ‘cause no one else is, and I’m like, shouldn’t that be design or product? And they’re like, maybe, but it’s not happening here. So it’s on us. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: I think one of the challenges is brand design has been so tightly aligned with marketing communications, it has narrowed the space within which it plays and the tools that are being brought to bear in terms of designing marketing experience. Whereas product marketing is actually a better relationship for design in terms of embracing all that design has to offer Jesse: And part of it, too, I think, has to do with the history and the legacy and the existing culture of the organization. So at Capital One, the design group, as it was starting to come together, faced some real cultural obstacles because so much of Capital One’s historical success had come from the work of the brand team that had built up this huge, really highly recognizable consumer brand. Peter: ”What’s in your wallet?” Jesse: Exactly, and that colored everyone’s understanding of what design was and what the value of design was that we then collectively, as a product design team, had to reeducate and re-re-educate and remind people that we were there to do something different, all the while wanting and striving for that relationship with brand that you’re talking about. There were people on both sides, on the brand side and the design side at Capital One who were working toward, tighter coordination. And it is something that, as far as I know, the folks at Capital One are still trying to unravel. Peter: Yeah, I would love an ethnographer or ethnographers to study the cultures of these different functions. I think there’s something fundamentally broken at the heart of marketing and marketing culture and it’s not anything that marketers are even necessarily cognizant of anymore because it’s, it’s the air they breathe. Jesse: …the water they’re swimming in. Peter: Todd Wilkens, when he was at Adaptive Path, had this series of Interpretations of users from different parts of the business, and marketers, he said, saw their customers as sheep. You frightened them towards a certain direction and then they’ll just go in that direction. And so the role of marketing is to just either scare or otherwise persuade. You can, just through stories and through messaging, get people to do what you want them to do. And I think that is deep within the mindset of marketing and advertising. And you know, you and I, and the others at Adaptive Path, so part of the reason I think we wanted to run far away from marketing is that is not the values we hold. We want to enable, we want to empower. And there was more opportunity to do that on the product side. Now, product has demonstrated a whole host of it’s own ethical issues, largely trying to turn digital media into slot machines and triggering people’s personalities.  As companies, we’re still struggling with cross-functional, cross-departmental coordination. For the longest time, for decades on end, functions could work in isolation of one another. Strategists come up with the goal of an organization. They pass that off to marketing. Marketing takes those goals, studies the market, comes up with a set of requirements for new offerings that will deliver the value that the strategists had identified. And then they pass those requirements on to designers. The designers take those requirements, create a bunch of specifications based on those requirements and pass that off to the engineers or manufacturers to take those specifications and figure out how to do it at scale. Jesse: And we all have our place in the great waterfall. Peter: In the last 20 years, as we’ve tried to embrace cross-functional, balanced-team, digital ways of working, where you’re not handing something off from one to another, but these folks are coming together, I think something we haven’t resolved are the cultural differences between these teams. This gets at some of what we were talking about last time with trust, like the meaningful cultural differences between these teams and how do we create that integument, that space within which they can coexist and collaborate. And I don’t think you can do that successfully until we have a shared understanding of where each team is coming from, what it is they value, what impact they want to have, how they behave. And we haven’t done enough to appreciate that from these different teams. So culturally, the teams are still behaving as if they’re in a waterfall isolation, but practically, they’ve been thrown together. And I think that may be some of the tension that we see in these organizations. Jesse: Well, I think in a big way, what you’re talking about has to do with shared values. And when you talk about what you see as this problem, this sickness in the culture of marketing, I feel like part of what you’re reacting to is the fact that it seems to be embodying some values that go against human centeredness. As an underlying value underneath everything that we’re doing, which is to bring that understanding of the user, but also respect for the user and the user’s humanity and the user’s human sovereignty to the work and not just push them around like sheep. Peter: Well, that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thank you for joining us as we continue to grapple with the challenges of design and design leadership. As always you can find us out in the world. On Twitter, I am @peterme and Jesse is @jjg. You can also reach us on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We have a contact form and we have been thrilled to receive communications from listeners. It not only makes our day, it gives us ideas for what we should be talking about. So please continue to join our journey as we continue finding our way. Jesse: Finding our way. Thanks, Peter. Peter: Your hair is looking normal. Jesse: Yeah, I was, I was, I realized this morning that it’s time for the second round quarantine haircut because the first round is now grown out. I, yeah, I can’t cut my own hair. Peter: All right. Well, cause I know you, I mean like that, that, that side, your left side left. Yeah. You kind of clipper, right? You shave that. Jesse: Weah, it’s actually, it’s a, it’s all the way around. It’s clipper all the way around in the back as well. So on both sides and in the back. Short back and sides. Peter: What’s it like having hair? Jesse: it’s, you know, it’s kind of like having a pet, you have to wash it. You have to take care of it. Check up on it. Peter: Feed it. Jesse: Mine likes, sirloin burger. Peter: Oh, okay. Sure. Jesse: Tartar. Peter: Only the finest. You just rub it right in? Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just sort of mash the ground beef into your scalp. It’s really, it’s wonderful for the texture. Peter: Do you use a, a lean, or a higher fat ground beef for that? Jesse: You know, it depends on the time of year. In the winter time, the higher fat is better. It kind of moisturizes the hair. It gives it a little bit more suppleness, a little bit more body in those, you know, those cold winter months, but in the summertime you can go with something leaner. Peter: Yeah, probably in the summertime, you don’t want too much fat on your scalp, ‘cause that would just like, you know, lock it, lock it in and you need to be able to sweat. You need to be able to cool off. So… Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. It also has a little bit of a, sort of a tanning oil effect. You end up with those, that scalp tan that’s really awkward. Peter: Again, see, I don’t, I don’t get these pleasures without hair… Jesse: Yeah, no, I know. I know, but you have, you, you can cut your own hair. Peter: Well, Stacy cuts my hair. I could, it’s, it’s helpful if she does it just to make sure it’s even like everywhere. When I’ve tried to do it myself, I get little patches, like teeny patches, patches, all the same. Jesse: Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s why I’m terrified to try to do my own hair for sure. Ah, so. Peter: “On this episode of…” I’m trying to think. It’s not, it’s not shaving our way, clipping our way, finding our hair. Jesse: Grooming our way.

In which we grapple with the multifarious concept of trust, in light of how important it is for leaders to establish, build, and maintain it in their relationships. Topics: Leadership coaching, psychological safety, resilience, conditions leading to trust, Michael Jordan’s uncompassionate leadership tactics, critique, bestowed authority, Brené Brown, non-judgment, leaders speak last, “being right” behavior, earning trust, maintaining positivity and authenticity in the face of difficulties; integrity; whether organizations can earn trust; trust falls; Amy Edmondson; Google’s Project Aristotle; accountability; trust as an emergent property; why all these models and theorists never mention trust; trust within a team; trust between teams; trust as an integument that enables cross-functional teams to collaborate; Drive by Daniel Pink; operationalizing trust is like eating soup with chopsticks or trying to capture a candle flame. Transcript Peter: Remember this from episode seven: We’re wary of bringing trust into this work environment because my guess is because we think we fear we will have to break it. At some point, we are going to have to make a decision that breaks that trust. And so we almost don’t want to start that conversation for fear of where it will go.But in order for us to make the–Jesse: Wow. That’s just, well, I want to, I want to allow some space for that. ‘Cause that’s a pretty powerful statement, what you just said. And, the notion that leaders are carrying around with them, this burden all the time of the knowledge that whatever trust they build, they might at some point have to destroy, as part of doing their job, it’s a challenging place to be.It’s interesting that we came to this place just because trust actually was a big component of the work that I was doing in the last couple of years at Capital One. And, it’s an area that I’ve been digging into, and trying to figure out how to bring a greater understanding of to my practice with leaders. So I have a lot of things to say about it.Peter: Well, maybe that becomes the subject for our next conversation.   Peter: That’s what we’re actually going to talk about today. Jesse: On Finding Our Way. Peter: You just love saying that, don’t you? Jesse: I don’t know. It just seems—  Intro Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. What were you thinking or what were you referring to when it came to the matter of trust in design leadership at Capital One? Jesse: Well, as I was transitioning into leadership coaching, part of what I was really trying to do was look at the larger systemic patterns across the various teams whose leaders I was working with, and trying to figure out what I could do to push the culture forward in meaningful ways from a non-leadership position, but rather from this position of coach to the leaders. And so I got interested in this concept of team resiliency and what helps teams stick together, hold together, pursue a vision together and see it through. And in reading into that kind of stuff, I started getting into issues of interpersonal relationships in the workplace and not just resiliency, but the safety that is created by the leaders of these teams.  So, psychological safety is a phrase that we’ve started hearing a lot about in workplace contexts, in terms of how much space do leaders create for a diversity of opinions. How much room is there for dissent in organizations, things like that. And it turns out that all of these things track really strongly with the set of ideas that I was thinking of as team resilience and digging into this whole subject area eventually came down to the question of who do you trust and how was that trust created and how does that trust develop and grow over time? And this takes place really purely at the level of two individuals, any two individuals in the team. There is a question of what is the existing trust relationship between those individuals? And in a lot of ways, I see the responsibility of the leader of the team to foster those trusting relationships, not just with the people that they’re engaging with, but among the people that they’re responsible for. Peter: Tell me a little bit more. You used the word resilience, which is a word I like. but I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. I see resilience as an ability to hold together come what may, primarily through challenges.  Jesse: I do see resilience as the ability of the team to hold together, come what may, and what you’re really talking about is the teams. Collective ability to face uncertainty together and to find a way through to a solution together and staying together as a team. You know, I think about these really enduring product teams, that we see in some of these longer standing organizations where somebody will move into a leadership role and they will gather around them their best collaborators, and they’ll take those collaborators with them from project to project and sometimes from organization to organization, where they’ve got a lot of trust built up there already, and they’re able to leverage those relationships and carry those forward into brand new areas where they don’t know what’s going to happen. But ultimately those places where the trust is thin are the places that eventually become fractures and fissures that break up teams and that create these breakdowns in unity of vision, unity of purpose. Peter: What are the conditions that you saw that prime a team for higher trust, or maybe behaviors and activities? Jesse: What we’re looking for, what trust ultimately is, is an internal barometer, a compass by which we evaluate other humans and how much confidence we can have in the predictability of their choices in their behavior. Peter: It’s like brand. Sorry. Jesse: Well, yeah, I mean, we talk about brand promises and, and yeah. Peter: Its promise. Yeah. Jesse: But it’s not necessarily a specific promise in that it’s not that I need to be able to predict exactly what you’re going to do in order to be able to trust you, but in order to be able to trust you, I do need to feel that whatever choices I see you make are internally consistent, are compassionate toward other humans, and are undertaken with a degree of care and awareness. And so we’re looking for, in other people, we’re looking for these signs that whatever decisions this person is going to make in the future are going to come from a place of groundedness in themselves. Awareness of what’s really going on around them. A certain degree of clarity there, right? And compassion toward the impact of their choices on the people around them. And so we’re looking for signs and signals of these things all the time. Peter: Interesting. Having just finished watching the 10-part ESPN docu-series on Michael Jordan in “The Last Dance,” I would argue that his teammates trusted him, but they did not find him compassionate. He was an asshole who would ride you very hard in order to get the best out of you.  Now, you could trust Michael Jordan in the ways that you’re talking about. He was highly predictable. You knew where he was coming from. You understood what his goals were, and he never wavered. So there was that solidity. But, the desire to meet the goal overrode everything else for him. And if his way to get there was to goad you through belittling, because he felt that was the lever by which you would perform better, you would be willing to do that. Jesse: I did use the word compassion, but I think that what I’m really talking about more is simply a level of human awareness. That is to say, Michael Jordan knew the effects of the choices that he was making on the other players and whether or not that contributed toward trusting relationships. Maybe with some people that did more than others. For some people, if you push me really hard to get me to a place that I want to get to, that I can’t get there by myself, that actually is a way of seeing me, serving me, supporting me, and for some people, if we can do that in a way that resonates, then it can be productive. If the leader is tuned out, not noticing the emotional effects of their choices on their team, that’s what creates the damage. Peter: Hmm. Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s funny. So, I think the reason many organizations, many even design teams struggle with critique, is that critique requires this trust that you’re talking about. In order for it to work, in order for you to be direct, in order for you to be honest, frank, forthright with one another such that the person receiving it doesn’t wilt in the face of the criticism, there needs to be that shared understanding, shared respect, and trust in one another. And I think what lacks in many of these organizations is that trust, is that sense that we are all aligned, we all have the same goals, and we all have this respect for one another, and so when you tell me that this design isn’t working, it’s not about me. It’s about the work. And in organizations where that hasn’t happened, when you told me this design isn’t working, I feel it’s about me. Jesse: One of the people who’s done a lot of research in this area is Brené Brown, who is a psychological researcher, who’s done a bunch of TED talks and has written a bunch of very popular, successful books. And in her research on the qualities of these trusting relationships, one of the qualities that she talks about is non-judgment, which is to be able to engage with someone about a situation, without holding a judgment about them as a person, through it. And so this is one of the behaviors that she’s identified in her research that contributes toward that sense of trust that you’re talking about.  So you’re touching on all of the same things. I do think there is an element that comes into play here that is maybe not as obvious to talk about, which is power and the way that power is used to force trust. Or to override mistrust. And again, that can go up to a point. But when you have these leaders who impose their will through authority rather than connecting people with meaning and purpose and bring them along, that is in the long term not a recipe for a trusting relationship. Peter: Yeah, I was thinking of that when I was thinking about critique because critique is a method that you learn in design school. And it surprises me then when you get out into the real world and you engage in critique, and designers often find themselves feeling attacked. And I think it’s in part, my hypothesis would be is that in design contexts for time immemorial, critique was predicated on this assumption of trust, particularly on the part of leadership, this power dynamic that you’re referring to. Leaders felt comfortable critiquing the work of their team without ever having established the needed underlying relationships, because they were in authority and the team members just kind of had to take it.  Jesse: Yeah.  Peter: And that there’s probably been this toxic dynamic for decades, centuries, in terms of how this was handled and like the abused child going on to abuse their children, it just kind of kept getting carried down ‘cause that seemed to be the way it had to be. Whereas, environments where, what did you call it? The non-judgment, Brené Brown’s non-judgment kind of quality will lead to better critique, than prior modes. The other thing, oh, the other thing I was thinking of when you talk about power, it’s a story that I tell that comes from my time at Adaptive Path that I then baked into my leadership training. Where we started Adaptive Path, there were seven equal partners. We were comfortable arguing with each other, fighting with each other, intellectually. Jesse: Hmm.  Peter: And that was just part of how we worked. And then we started bringing people in. And the earlier folks we brought in tended to be okay with this dynamic. We tended to find folks who were strong-willed, who were eager to engage with this kind of rough-and-tumble intellectual discourse. But as we grew, we ended up, as one does, you just find different personality types and some people who were clearly not comfortable with that way of engaging, and I hadn’t realized it. I tend to not be the most immediately empathetic person. And so I would engage as I always had, which, you know, people are showing work or giving a presentation and looking for feedback. And I would give my feedback very directly ‘cause I want to make it better. And what I didn’t know was happening was that people were receiving that poorly, and it was shutting them down.  And it was one of our colleagues, Laura Kirkwood-Datta, who I remember pulled me aside and basically said, she said, “You can’t do that.” I’m like, “Do what?” She says, “You can’t talk, you can’t engage in that way in these group sessions when we’re working through things,” and I’m like, “Why not?” I’m like, “It’s just ideas. We’re all here with our ideas. We’ve always talked about our ideas. We’ve always said best idea wins,” and she’s like, “You’re the boss,” and I’m like, “No, I’m not. We’re all equal.” Then she’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. You’re the boss. You’re a founder. You’re in a position of power and authority, and when you talk, it stops the conversation.” And it took me a while, like I was defensive at first. After a couple of days, I realized the wisdom in what she said. And, what this has turned into in my leadership practice is that leaders speak last. In any room, the most senior person should be the last person to talk. If the leader talks earlier, then that becomes an edict that people feel like they have to follow. What usually happens is at some point in the conversation, someone will say whatever the leader wanted to say, but because it emerged from the group, now it doesn’t feel like an edict. It feels like something we believe, and they are much more likely to carry it forward with vigor as opposed to just feeling like it’s a command. Jesse: I think there is definitely a not small amount of the leader’s job that simply involves listening intently until someone says something that you agree with and then agreeing. Peter: Which can be hard for a certain kind of leader. I mean, you and I, I think we’ve talked about this, like all throughout our lives, we were lauded and given good grades and celebrated for being right and making good arguments. And, there’s a culture that supports that behavior. But when you’re getting into these group contexts, that kind of behavior, that “being right” behavior, that “smartest person in the room” behavior can actually be defeating and deflating for a team. Jesse: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. and we’ve talked a little bit about how the stance of the leader needs to be different from the stance that they held as a designer in the room. They have to recognize that their words have a different weight now than they did before. The truth is that every leader is going to bring baggage from their previous experiences to the role, whether you’re a design leader or a technology leader or any kind of a leader, and those things can be unconscious patterns that, to your point, can be undermining your ability to effectively earn trust from your team. And I think that word earn is really important because it is an investment that you’re making toward the future when you are engaging in these trust-growing activities. And you know, when we all find ourselves under psychological pressure, we fall back on our shortcuts. And for some leaders, when they find themselves in those positions, they fall back on shortcuts that undermine their ability to engage in these trust-growing behaviors. It becomes a little bit harder for them to be as entirely open with the team as maybe they want to be. It becomes a little bit harder for them to be as compassionate in their communications. it becomes a little bit harder for them to show up with the consistency that drives trust among a team. Those kinds of things. Music break Peter: Leadership is hard. And I don’t think a lot of leaders understand just how hard it is before they get into it. And I don’t think a lot of them necessarily realize how hard it is to do right once they’re in it. And one of the key places it’s hard is this balancing of information that you now have access to at a leadership level, oftentimes, which can be quite difficult. You’re part of a company. The company may be struggling. You’re not meeting your numbers. There’s an HR violation or some, whatever it is, you get access to all kinds of information.  And you as a leader have to figure out, How do you engage your team, now, knowing what you know? Because one of the things that I am firmly in belief in is that leaders have to maintain positivity with their teams. It does them and their teams no good, for leaders, if they hear that Q1 sucked, to then in the next team meeting to talk about how sucky Q1 was, right? ‘Cause that’s just going to crumble everyone else on the team. And so one of the biggest challenges that leaders face is how do they maintain authenticity, honesty, their own integrity, given what they know, while maintaining positivity when times are tough. Jesse: Hmm. That is hard. Peter: And that’s something that I’ve struggled with, ‘cause you don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses. You don’t want to snow people into thinking, like, “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.” And then they find out, you know, three weeks later that they’ve been laid off. But you also don’t want to say in three weeks, a third of you are going to be laid off. So you start figuring out how to be truthful. You never want to lie. How do you be truthful? Jesse: Obviously one factor that is related to trust is honesty. And it can be really challenging for a leader not to commit a thousand sins of omission every day, in terms of the information that they’re leaving out of their communications, but I will say that what people are looking for is a degree of clear-headedness. Are you being, not just honest with me, but are you being honest with yourself about the reality of the situation? And are you operating from. a self-aware stance? You know, when you talk about rose-colored glasses, that’s another way of undermining trust. You don’t even have to lie to do it if you are not being truthful with yourself about the reality of the situation. And then how do you motivate people in that case? Again, I think it’s a matter of are you connecting back to the sense of meaning and purpose that drives your engagement in the work in the first place. Peter: I want to circle back to something you said earlier about earning trust, because I agree with you. I think that was my a-ha moment when I was at this conference and we were talking about, How do we get employees to be more fully engaged in their work? And we do that by connecting them with meaning and purpose. And as I was noodling on that, I realized, yes, you might engage people through meaning and purpose, but if you don’t earn their trust, then that meaning and purpose kind of washes away. Jesse: Well, and another thing related to what you’re talking about here is the notion of integrity, which is, are you acting out your values? Are you walking your talk? And, if you say that something is important to you and I see you do something else, even if we have previously aligned around that value, I can still hold that value, but what is lost is the sense that I share it with you. Peter: Right, right, right. So trust needs to be earned. It’s earned. Gradually over time it builds. it’s one of those things that probably build slowly and then can be taken away quite quickly. But, my question for you, ‘cause you also mentioned at the heart of trust is the relationship between two individuals, and I’m wondering about trust in organizations, What is an employee’s trust? Even a leader’s trust, much less a member of their team’s trust with the organization, the company that they work for. And I’m just curious if you unpack that at all in your research around trust. Jesse: Well, I mean, yes, people have relationships with the organizations that they work for, but not in the same way that I’m talking about. You can’t build a trusting relationship with a system. Peter: It’s funny though, because these companies are trying to be that. They want to earn your trust, right? All of these very you know, pro-employee organizations, that are trying to look out for you as an employee and, and where they want you to feel like this is your family. And it’s your home away from home…  Jesse: And I can tell from your tone of voice that you think it’s a bunch of empty rhetoric, which is exactly what it is, which is exactly what it sounds like, because it’s not a substitute for the thing that actually keeps people in organizations, which is working with people who have their backs, and that’s what trust is. Peter: What, so what then? Hmm? Is it not possible for an organization to earn a team members trust? Jesse: I don’t think so because as soon as you change the leadership of that organization, the trust is reset. Peter: I think I agree. It’s just intriguing for how many people that becomes this startling notion when that trust is lost.  Jesse: If organizations want to build trust with employees, they need to be elevating trustworthy leaders and making the qualities of trustworthy leaders cultural values within the organization. And I would say that, coming back to the notion of resilience, organizations that tend to hold teams together for a long time tend to do so because those trust relationships are not just with the leadership. They are matrixed, and there’s a broad web of trust relationships across the organization that doesn’t just follow reporting structures. That doesn’t just follow the shape of the organization itself. So, I think that the most effective leaders, the ones who are able to create these more resilient teams, are not just creating trusting relationships of their own, but they are helping the people who are in their care create trusting relationships with each other and with the people that they have to engage with—their business partners, their technology partners, whoever they are. Peter: Right.  Jesse: It is fostering a culture of trust-building that is the thing that makes organizations trustworthy. Peter: Yeah. For some unfortunate reason, maybe because I’m a glib, cynical mofo, you know, all I can think of are trust falls, and hackneyed team building exercises. Jesse: That stuff doesn’t work either. And because it’s not a substitute for these things that I’m talking about, it’s not a substitute for showing that you know what you’re doing. It’s not a substitute for showing up in consistent ways over time. It is not a substitute for being honest and clear with people. It’s not a substitute for showing that you care about the impact of your decisions on others. Peter: It’s funny. So you mentioned psychological safety, which I believe is a phrase that was brought forth to the world by a researcher at Harvard, Amy Edmondson, did a lot of work on teams and teaming and recognized the power of psychological safety. It probably, at least in our universe, caught wind when Google did a project, trying to understand what led to teams being successful. Their People and Culture group did some internal research. And their hypothesis was that the best teams were the teams with the best people on it. And because Google had had kind of this mindset that, you get really brilliant people, throw them together, give them a problem, and, and let them run with it. And that is how you achieve success.  And the research showed that… I don’t even know if talent measured on the top five factors of team success. And there were two things that were overwhelmingly important. One was psychological safety. It was far and away… It was like tier one, far above tier two, and then tier two was far above three, four, and five. Tier one was psychological safety, essentially, that you will not be threatened or at risk within a team based on your actions. You can speak freely, you can try things and if they don’t work, you are not going to be humiliated. You were not going to be demoted. You are not going to be fired or whatever fear that might be in other contexts if you were to have not great outcomes. And instead, it was going to be recognized. Like, you know what, that’s just part of the process and you are safe here. And that safety led to better performance. The second most important thing, which is something you just touched on as well, is accountability. That you are accountable to one another as team members and that you follow through on what you say you will do. Essentially those two things were far and away the most important factors of team success, at Google. Jesse: And so in Brené Brown’s research, she refers to these two qualities as accountability and reliability. Reliability being the consistency with which you show up and accountability being simply your willingness to own your mistakes and to take responsibility for the consequences of your choices. Peter: There’s a lot about team building that we can talk about and could unpack here. That’s been a subject of my research interest for the last year and a half. Though, it’s funny, I never really poked a trust as a factor. I guess it’s an emergent property of these other aspects, but it’s almost never discussed in and of itself as a goal or an objective or a necessary criteria. For some reason, that word, it’s almost like a third rail word.  Jesse: Yeah, it is. Because if you’re going to talk about trust, then you have to admit the possibility of mistrust, and then that becomes, I think, a dangerous thing for organizations to consider. Having to actively manage it really makes them uncomfortable. Maybe dangerous is not the right word, but uncomfortable. Peter: Definitely uncomfortable. So one of the challenges that I’m currently facing is, supporting a team where there is by-and-large trust internally, though there are some misgivings, there are some challenges with communication and transparency. As I was unpacking that, what I believe to be true is that the issues are less within this design team and more within the organization as a whole. And I kind of want to create this safe space for the team, this bailiwick, this home for them where they can be their fullest, best, completist, most trusting selves, and we can probably get much of the way there. The issue is these teams don’t exist in isolation, these teams are part of larger organizations that don’t necessarily share the value of this particular design team. We’re running up against that boundary line of, yes, we can be safe when we’re in our cave, but we often have to venture out of the cave and we have to go talk to the people in other caves, or we have to meet on the field and build a fire together. And we don’t all have the same sense of how to build that fire. And now we’re arguing with each other. And that affects how that person, then, when they go back to the cave, yes, they can get affirmation and stuff, but when they spend most of their time out on the field arguing with the other fire tenders, I have trouble figuring out how to solve that issue as a design leader, because much of that is outside of my control. Jesse: And it’s this indirect empowerment of the team members with the trust-building skills, with the relationship-building skills to give them the skills to do that. So imagine, you know, out there in the wilderness around the fire, like you’re talking about, if somebody is going to get all those groups organized and aligned and to agree with each other, who do you think it’s likely to be? It’s going to be the people who came from the team that had the strongest practices like that internally to begin with. So in a lot of ways, I feel like we have to take these practices out to the larger organization because that’s the only way we get that larger scale alignment, which is essential to our larger scale success. Peter: My hope was, I actually said this, my shining hope for us is that by doing it right ourselves, we become a model. We can model behaviors that others will adopt, when they see how well it works for us. There is a challenge though in that, the behaviors that work well for a design team aren’t necessarily going to be the behaviors that work well for an engineering team, for a marketing team, for a sales team. Part of the reason I like to think about protecting design, is you almost need to keep these other cultural practices at bay because they might work for their teams, but if design were to try to behave like an engineering team, if design were trying to behave like a product team, design loses its spark. And so how do you maintain those distinct qualities that serve this group behaving at its most effective, while allowing that group to successfully integrate with these other teams whose values and cultures are themselves distinct? Jesse: Well, I think that’s what this process of growing trust is all about. This is about people with differences and how we figure out how to get along and move in coordinated fashions despite differences of perspectives and differences of experiences and differences of backgrounds and all of those things. Music break 2 Peter: So I guess, trust then becomes a medium. Like we talked about relationships a few episodes ago. Trust becomes a medium that allows different groups with different cultures, different backgrounds, different priorities, to not just co-exist, but to collaborate. And it doesn’t matter that my team has a different set of values and behaviors than your team. What matters is I can trust you and your team in the solidity, in the predictability, in terms of some higher-order values that we are aligned on. There might be some team specific values, designers are going to be empathetic in some way, and engineers are going to be about speed or performance… Jesse: Well, again, then the question is one of integrity. Are you living your values? Do I see you living your values? Peter: Well, there’s probably two orders of values. There’s going to be some higher order values that should bind us all together. And then another level of values for each of us in our teams. You don’t need a lot of those higher order values, but as long as people on other teams share those higher order values, and have that dependability, solidity, predictability, integrity as you said, it almost doesn’t matter that we behave differently in our own groups. This trust becomes this integument, becomes this medium, becomes this binding force… Jesse: Yes, yeah…  Peter: That allows us to successfully engage with one another. Jesse: Yeah. If you think of the people on the team as being these sovereign city-states, each with their own culture and resources and all of it, and we want to connect those city-states together, we need to pave some roads like the Romans did. And those roads are paved with trust. It is the foundation that connects us. And that trust is put in place one cobblestone at a time as we exhibit these behaviors. And I think that when you’re going to take up that role that design often takes up that we’ve talked about design in some cases needing to take up in organizations. That role of being the contrarian in some ways, of holding a distinct set of values separate from those of your partners in the organization because that brings something to design as a practice or that brings a perspective that the other functions in the organization don’t have. When you are taking that on, it is extra incumbent on you to be the one who is investing in the trusting relationship because these people are automatically gonna walk in with a lot of reasons to mistrust you, a lot of reasons not to be clear on your priorities or your intentions because you are coming in from a clearly acknowledged different place culturally. I think the biggest takeaway that I’m taking from this whole conversation is the way in which these trust issues, they’re, they are multifaceted. There are lots of different kinds of issues that when you look at them more closely, they are actually trust issues. And they are pervasive at all scales in the organization. Whether you’re talking about the one-on-one relationship, or the relationship with the leader of the team, or the relationship of teams to teams, or the relationship of leaders and teams to entire organizations, trust and all of these different facets of trust are going to be factors throughout all of those. Peter: This study out of Google talking about psychological safety and accountability still doesn’t use the word trust. Or another resource that I really like is the book Drive by Daniel Pink, which is where this concept of autonomy, mastery and purpose became popularized as a way to encourage employee engagement. He never discusses, at least I don’t recall, trust either. And I’m wondering if trust was something that you found someone out there discussing, or if that was an insight you had as you were mulling over this material that you’re like, this all seems to be building up to this notion, oh, this notion is trust. Jesse: I think when you look at team resilience, team cohesion, team happiness, psychological safety, trust, all of these things track very closely together. They’re all tangled up together. I think that if you polle dany random half a dozen articles on one keyword, you would find most of the other keywords tangled up in there somewhere, you know. Peter: Yeah. Yeah. My modeling brain though is trying to develop the set of relationships between them.  Jesse: It’s not like that. It is more gestalt than that. Peter: Okay. ‘Cause part of me, in a pragmatic way, wants to think about, “How do we operationalize this understanding of trust?” Jesse: Yes.  Peter: Is that something measurable? Is this something that, you know, these other, aspects can build up to? Jesse: I would say you don’t operationalize it in the ways that you were describing. It is not something that gets managed through processes. It is something that is a matter of how leaders show up day-to-day. How are they engaging with that team, meeting after meeting after meeting. It’s about the individual skills and capabilities of those leaders and their ability to manage themselves and to show up in their most effective ways day in, day out. Peter: That’s not a satisfying answer. I want to, I want to model this so that I can, I can teach it. Jesse: Well. I would say, you can do that. You can do that, and it won’t actually do what you want to do because it’s a skills development thing. It’s like writing down Michael Jordan’s, you know, key insights on, on completing the flying dunk. It doesn’t work that way. You got to get out on the court. Peter: Right, right, right, right. I hear that. I just. Jesse: I hear your frustration.  Peter: If I believe in the modeling and measurement, if I believe, or at least the unpacking of, things like psychological safety and accountability and autonomy and mastery and purpose. And maybe these are components that are more bounded, manageable, specific. And as you said about this gestalt is what happens when you pull all this together and something emerges. Something grows out of that that isn’t as easy to define, or in and of itself is multivalent because there’s so many trust vectors and trying to capture it, it’s like trying to capture…. Jesse: It’s eating soup with chopsticks. Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Eating soup with chopsticks. I was thinking capture a candle flame ‘cause the act of capturing it snuffs it out. And maybe that’s the reality, which… that doesn’t sit well with me. Jesse: Well, I mean, this is, it’s all continuing and ongoing and unfolding. You know…  Peter: Fuck you. I’m going to model trust. Jesse: I trust your model. I’m sure I will. Peter: Well, and maybe trust is too, it’s not ephemeral, it’s real and it exists. But is it is unbounded. It’s like how people used to think of the ether, right? It’s kind of everywhere. It kind of just pervades, and there’s degrees of it, but it’s not a thing you point at and go, yes, I have trust. Okay. I will have to, uh, there’s something, almost Zen koan-like about this where you just kind of have to accept the… Jesse: Yeah, I feel like we’ve brought you to the point of spiritual crisis and, I should let you integrate this new understanding of the cosmos. Peter: I need to, I need to meditate now or at least take a walk.  Well, that has been a somewhat mind-bendy and at times challenging episode of Finding Our Way. Thank you, Jesse. As always, we are interested in what you have to say. Maybe you have models for trust that you can share with us or resources that we should be digging into. You can find us on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. You can find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We have a contact form there. That we eagerly read what people send us, and we’d love to hear what you think. So, please reach out and thank you again, for all those who have been giving us feedback as we’ve been getting this off the ground, it’s been great to hear from you and we look to hear from you more. So with that, we say goodbye to another episode of Finding Our Way.  Jesse: Thanks, Peter. 

In which we continue to grapple with in-house vs design consultancy distinctions, and see promise in the creation of senior strategic design roles within some companies. Topics: working in teams; working like a consultancy; Metropolis; the lie of design schools; the reality of in-house design practice; cycles of abuse; working in truly high-performance design contexts; the stage model of cook apprenticeship; the capacity of design programs; rotation programs within and across companies; the emerging role of Principal Designer. Transcript Jesse: Previously on Finding Our Way: Letter Peter: We’ve asked listeners to send in their thoughts, and we have one from a gentleman who referred to himself as Consultancy Rat. And, his email to us goes as follows.  “I have spent the bulk of my design career in consulting… However, I am sensing a growing divide between design consulting and in house design… The design students in a master’s program in which I have taught for a few years, increasingly find the notion of production and shipping digital product…to be the penultimate. Whereas wrestling with ambiguity in new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design, craft, working with Anna mitts, other designers, while spreading the gospel of design seems less and less the ideal to most students… But I find this shift troubling at a community slash craft level as well as the personal level of my career in design leadership… How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams?  Jesse: And now, the conclusion. The Show Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. I wanted to circle back. I’ve got a thing that I want to talk about, related to Consultancy Rat’s initial email that occurred to me as I was reading it,and recognizing his frustration, which is, frankly, my frustration with how in-house design has largely been reduced to just people who are pumping out assets to feed into the engineering furnace to power these product development engines. A couple of weeks ago there was this Remote Design Week conference, and I gave a talk called, “The Atomic Unit of Design is the Team.” One of my biggest frustrations with in-house design, and has been for a decade now, is how it has elevated this notion of the unicorn product designer, this individual designer who’s going to work on a cross-functional team, some type of scrum team or squad, you know, you have a designer, you have a product manager, and you have a set of engineers.  And that is what design looks like in most of these companies And, there’s a ton of problems with that. Where I come back to is one of the things that you learn in a consulting context is that design is best done in teams. Pretty much all work is best done in teams, but design is best done in teams. Adaptive Path almost never staffed a project that wasn’t a team, even if it was just two designers. Jesse: Oh, yeah, “Nobody flies solo,” I think was the way that we always framed it. Peter: Because there’s power in teamwork. You can’t expect any individual to have suitable competency across the range of skills needed for digital product design. No one person is good at interaction design, visual design, information architecture, copywriting, user research, in terms of the craft skill sets, as well as the communication, the leadership, all the professional skills that you need in order to succeed.  Jesse: I would say even beyond that, even if they had the whole smorgasbord of possible skills, they still are hamstrung by their own perspective and always, always, always in any kind of creative work, having a second perspective in the room strengthens the work. Peter: Exactly. So, in this talk I talk about how pretty much since I moved from working in Adaptive Path to in-house, I’ve tried to, as I put it, team-ify my design teams, often within an environment that does not naturally support it. A lot of these product development environments are essentially built on some flavor of scrum or the Spotify squad model, which is these small teams with the idea of being one designer, one product manager, and a set of engineers. And so I’ve tried to figure out how can I pull designers out of those scrum context and into a design team that works across a set of scrums. But, there’s a, phrase that I wrote on a slide when I gave this talk that I think is relevant, to what we’re talking about, which is “Much of my career since leaving Adaptive Path has been trying to figure out how to bring relevant aspects of an environment dedicated to quality design into corporate contexts.”  At Adaptive Path, our mission was to deliver the best design. That’s all anyone paid us for. And so we optimized our environment to deliver great design. You go in-house, now you’re in a context where the best design isn’t the ultimate goal, There’s other things that that business is about. What I’ve tried to do is figure out how do I bring the qualities, and frankly, the organizational thinking that we had at Adaptive Path, that allowed us to do great design work, and find ways to imbue, integrate those ideas within a corporate context. The one thing that doesn’t work is that internal agency model, right? This internal services firm, we know that doesn’t work, so design can’t be a black box, that briefs come in one side of and assets come out the other side of, right? It has to be woven into the practice, but how can you weave it into an existing product development structure without design kind of getting dissipated and dissolved into that environment. How does design maintain its integrity? And that has been my professional challenge for the last 10 years or so now. And one of the key issues that I see is maintaining design in teams. I’m saying all this though, to kind of speak to, when I empathize with Consultancy Rat, it’s this recognition. I think he’s right that much of in-house design has been reduced to this factory model, because it seems to serve the existing product development structures and processes. But what it ends up doing is, frankly, inhibiting or constraining design’s potential within these contexts. And so, figuring out how do you create a safe space for design to be at its fullest in the face of the forces that Consultancy Rat is recognizing, I mean, that’s been my mission. Jesse: As much as I’m interested in the impact of this on organizations and on leaders, I’m also interested in the impact of this on the designers who are a part of this larger machine, these factory UX workers. Peter: I’m imagining, you know, Metropolis or something. Right.  Jesse: Yes, exactly. Lots of clanging going on. I’m reminded of an exchange I had on Twitter last year, with a young designer who was in his first job out of college, as a product designer at Instagram and was offering up a bunch of really sharp, really cogent advice for being a product designer in an environment like that. And most of it boiled down to: forget most of the things that you were taught in school because you are never ever going to use them. Forget about user needs analysis. Forget about anything connected to design thinking. Get good at prototyping, get good at prototyping fast, get good at encapsulating requirements in ways that product managers can easily consume them. And this was his advice for being successful in user experience. So there’s that data point. I also have conversations with young designers all the time about what they’re seeing out in the market. And what I am hearing from people is a lot of frustration and a lot of burnout, especially if you went to what you and I would consider a good UX program. One that really taught the whole soup to nuts of traditional UX practices. And then you came out into the marketplace with this dream of the strategic work that you’d be able to do, and then the only jobs that you could find that anybody would consider you for were these production jobs, people feel betrayed. They feel let down. They feel like they’ve been sold snake oil by the entire field of user experience. They’ve been set up for something that’s never going to materialize for them. At least that’s how it feels. And then they get into a role like this and it’s like, well, you’ve got to, you know, buckle down and find your place on the factory floor, or you’ve got to get out and find something else to do with your life, and that sucks. Peter: Yeah, it’s frustrating, too, because bringing these early career designers into contexts like this where perhaps they did have a breadth of understanding because of however they were taught, but then they are only engaging with a quarter to a third of that practice, and the remaining elements start to atrophy ‘cause there’s just not a need for it. Thinking about it from a design leadership standpoint, you know, 10 years later, as these folks are starting on managing and leading teams, either they are not set up to succeed because at that level, they are expected now to re-engage with matters of strategy and vision, and they’ve lost that muscle, or, it becomes this vicious cycle where they end up leading design as essentially a form of plumbing where it is this factory work where my job is to have my team be the most effective and efficient widget builders there are. And that’s how I’m valued and that’s what I understand my value to be.  Jesse: Right, right.  Peter: I mean, that becomes perilous for the future of design as a practice because it is so reductive. Jesse: Yeah. Well this is the thing is… When I read this guy, his name is Joe Kennedy, his thread about his experiences or what he learned from being a designer at Instagram, I read that and I was like, “There is nobody looking out for this guy.” There is no design leader who is taking care of this person as a creative resource and nurturing their development as a creative contributor to the organization.  Peter: And that might be because that design leader didn’t know any better.  Jesse: But that’s because they’re… That, that’s the thing, is because they’re not hiring design leaders, they are hiring product managers to oversee product designers and they don’t know, and they don’t care and they’re not interested.  Peter: You would hope the design manager would be the one to look out for that designer. But again, that design manager probably came up through the system. And this was one of the struggles that I’ve had, like even back when I inherited that team at Groupon of a bunch of dudes in their mid-twenties who thought they were great designers and thought they understood what great design was. And I’m like, you’ve never been in an environment where there’s actually legitimately great design, but they didn’t know that. Literally I had 25 year olds who thought they had reached the pinnacle, that there was nowhere for them to go. When they did self-evaluations, they were like scoring themselves five out of five on everything. Cause they didn’t know.  Jesse: Crushing it.  Peter: And I’m like, what’s going on here? And that’s one that I don’t quite know how to break that wheel. Because until you’ve been in an environment where you’ve experienced truly elevated design, you don’t know what it looks like. I was fortunate that I had two formative career experiences. I worked at a CD-ROM company called Voyager that hired amazing designers to work on their CD-ROMs. And we were all figuring it out as we went along. And what they were mostly amazing at was visual design.  And then my next job was at Studio Archetype. Similarly, the focus tended to be on the visual design, though Lillian Svec was building out an information architecture practice. And Studio Archetype was one of the earliest to have a substantial information architecture and interaction design practice for a consultancy. But these were environments that were, where design was loved, truly loved, supported, cared for, given the space for, was not an afterthought, was not, “How do we cross that line item off?” but was instead a focus. And so I was fortunate very early to see what it took to deliver amazing design. Jesse: High performing design organizations have always been a rarity, that’s just sort of the nature of it, especially as the work itself has been evolving so rapidly in the spaces that you and I work in.  Peter: The issue was design generally operated at such small scale compared to all these other functions. that it wasn’t a big deal. and if you did want quality design 15 years ago, you went to a consultancy, that’s where all the best designers were. That’s where the best understanding of design was. And over the last 15 years, we’ve had this fundamental shift of the energy for design moving in house. And then we’ve had design as an industry just scale rapidly and massively.  So 20 years ago, most practicing designers, and let me say at least half of the practicing designers likely would have been in an environment where good design happened ‘cause they were working in a consulting company context doing good design. It’s just that the field was super small.  Now, 20 years later, most designers have never been in an environment where truly good design has been practiced. They don’t know what it looks like. They don’t know what it is. And, I don’t know what to make of that. It’s almost like what we need is some place where all these designers can go and spend three months. It’s like in restaurants, the stage process in restaurants. Whereas you’re coming up as a cook, you can go stage for the best restaurants in the world, working in an environment where great cooking is happening, and then you can come back and, we don’t have that kind of rotation for designers to go to the great places where design is happening, to see what it really takes to do great design and then return to wherever you were and bring those practices back. But we always need something like that if we’re going to see design reach the potential that is expected of it. Jesse: I think the closest thing to that that people have right now are these college degrees or certificate programs that are exposing them to these practices, but they’re doing it in this sort of hermetically-sealed sterile-sandbox kind of fashion that doesn’t necessarily map to real world design delivery. Peter: If you look at the top design programs, your CMUs, your Institute of Designs, your whatevers, they just don’t operate at scale nearly big enough to process the number of designers, that the world needs. So now you have these General Assembly or other types of UX boot camps…  Jesse: CMU has just added an undergraduate degree in HCI, by the way. Peter: That’s a start.  Jesse: Yeah, they’re moving in that. Peter: The, the issue is literally every college could possibly have a design program and it wouldn’t be enough right now. Just given the need. So now you have these General Assembly and other UX boot camps that are not teaching this highest order design. They’re teaching what we said at the outset: What are the things you need to know so that you can get a job? You need to know how to work these tools and you need to know these basic practices and boom, you can now get a job you can plug into the factory model. And I think what’s missing, thinking about that restaurant analogy, is this recognition of design as a craft. We talk about craft a bunch. Design is a craft. The way you learn craft is through apprenticing and guilds and mentorship relationships and that kind of thing. I do see about UX mentor programs out in the world, but they’re few and far between. And most people are not getting exposed to those. And I hadn’t thought about this, but I wonder if there’s some deep cultural change that needs to occur within the development of designers to almost reengage with some type of guild model, master/apprentice model. I don’t know what it looks like to do it at the kind of scale that we need, but it feels like that’s a direction that could work.  Jesse: I agree with you and I, in fact, I have advocated for a long time for, going back at least as far back as the early days of Adaptive Path, when we first started talking about bringing new designers in, I was interested in instituting something like an apprenticeship rotation kind of a model, which was one idea that we talked about at that time. And I think more broadly…  Peter: Though, like between us and other design firms, or… Jesse: No, no. It would be that new designers coming in would have an opportunity to partner with a founder for a period of time and then rotate it so that they could learn how you worked and then learn how I worked, learn how Jeff worked… Peter: Ah, within the business they’d get a rotation, right? ‘Cause what I’m talking about is like how you get someone going from company to company… Jesse: Yeah. As, as a means of skill building, but, yeah. So you take that, and then you scale that out to the, to the scale of the entire design community and you get what you’re talking about. I don’t know how to create that. I think it would be a really compelling way to level up the entire practice of design at every level, not just at the level of junior designers, but eventually those junior designers become design leaders. And to have those design leadership practices, imbued and enriched with that experience as well, I think would be super valuable.  Peter: To take a hopeful view, and I’m hopeful because of some stuff I am seeing, where they’re hiring principals, they’re hiring architects, they’re hiring senior designers to be explicitly creative and strategic and to mentor their teams. And I think one of the things we’re seeing potentially is that up until a couple years ago, everyone was on this hamster wheel of design-as-delivery, but some people who had been doing this long enough were like, “Wait a moment, we’re missing something here. Now I’m leading a team of 40, 80, 150, and all I have are squads of crank turners. That’s not right.”  And I think what we’re starting to see is this recognition that we need to bring back this more senior strategic design role, and my hopefulness is that we’ve gone through this period of pain that was largely a reflection or reaction to this scaling of design within this somewhat mechanistic product development environment and a feeling that we had to accommodate to that mode. And what I’m starting to see in some of my conversations with design leaders is we don’t need to accommodate to that mode. We don’t need to have designers embedded on scrum teams. We can have designers working in teams, working across scrum teams. We have a big enough organization where it makes sense that I can hire someone who’s been doing this type of work for 15, 20 years, potentially in a consulting capacity, bring them in-house and they can do very similar work: Being strategic, being a leader, synthesizing across user understanding, developing practices and processes for doing great design and then teaching that internally and leveling up this whole organization. Where I’m hopeful is that we’re at the outset of that realization. That we almost have to do this. That we’re essentially stuck. If these leaders are recognizing that if they want design to be as effective and to reach the potential that they know it can. Oftentimes these leaders don’t have capacity to do it themselves. They’re running big organizations, but they recognize that they can bring people in whose focus is on that creative and strategic leadership, that can pay immense dividends internally. And again, I know a number of companies that now have principal product designer, principal user researcher roles. And that to me suggests that there is a path forward, at least in these larger companies.  Jesse: Are these principals running teams? I mean, are they… I mean, there , there’s reporting structure and then there’s the day to day. Are they leading teams or are they… Peter: They are leading teams. They’re not running teams. It’s kind of what we talked about a few episodes ago in terms of that distinction between management and leadership. These principal designers are leading large efforts. There might be another 5 to 10 designers involved. And then the product managers and engineers as well. And these principle designers are the primary creative leadership, for a big set of work. It could be an end to end app, right? You might have a principal designer whose job is to lead the design of that app. You need dozens of people, potentially hundreds of people to do all the work, building that app. But you can have an individual who is that creative leader who’s hanging all that together. And they are not managers. The designers that are working with them are not reporting to them, but the designers working with them are looking to that principal to lead them like, at Adaptive Path and another consulting environments. We always had a creative lead and the other practitioners looked to that person as leader of that work, but they weren’t reporting to them. I think that can be a path forward. Yes, you can have this type of strategic, big picture, creative design practice internally that they set the vision, they set that North Star that you were referring to, and then they work with other design leaders and product leaders throughout the organization to figure out how to segment that work so it can be picked up by the delivery mechanisms and turned into something that ships. Jesse: How much do you think that role is able to influence design process of design practice in these organizations? Peter: Potentially a lot. When I’ve written job descriptions for this role, one of the key expectations and responsibilities is mentorship. And is developing practices and processes for how to do the work, either at the basic level, bringing in the best practices, just making sure that you’re doing your user-centered design stuff, right? But then, potentially there’s some expectation that they’re going to be developing new practices, probably specific to the context that we’re in, but figuring out, “We can’t just do off the shelf, quote unquote UCD. We need to figure out a way to make that work within our context.” So, they’re bringing in these processes and practices. They’re leading the creative work. And as part of that creative leadership, key to their role is that cross-functional education. They need to help product people and engineers understand why we should work this way and how to work this way. Jesse: So it sounds like, when Consultancy Rat is yearning for wrestling with ambiguity and new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design craft, working with and amidst other designers while spreading the gospel of design, sounds like that is still very much alive out there in these in house positions. Peter: There’s potential for it. I wouldn’t say that they’re the norm. I wouldn’t say that they are typical, but they exist. it’s too early to tell if this is the start of a trend that’s growing, but there is that potential, and that’s what I would encourage him and anyone in a similar situation to consider.  Jesse: Thank you, Peter. Peter: Thank you, Jesse.  Well that about wraps up another shining episode of Finding Our Way, the podcast about design and design leadership. Thank you for taking the time to listen. This time, I want to actually thank listeners for the feedback we’ve been getting, whether it was the email from Consultancy Rat that proved to be enough to encourage Jesse and I, or feedback we’re getting on Twitter, feedback I’m seeing on LinkedIn. It means the world to us to see that people are listening and getting something from this. We want to continue to, deliver, and be relevant. So, again, you can find us, on Twitter:  I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. You can find us on our website at https://findingourway.design/. and there’s a contact form there. That’s actually how Consultancy Rat reached out to us. Jesse: Fill out the form, send us some email. We respond. Peter: Yes, we do. And not only do we respond, we record entire episodes for every email that is sent. Jesse: No, we don’t. We..  Peter: No, we don’t. No. Um, but, yes, we want this conversation not to just be between Jesse and I, but be part of a larger dialogue. So thank you to Consultancy Rat for inspiring today’s conversation and we look forward to others, reaching out to us as well. And with that, I’m going to sign off and say thank you, Jesse. Jesse: Thank you, Peter. Finding our way. Peter: I’m just, I’m reviewing the, I think we’ve actually got, maybe we hit the high points on the on the Consultancy Rat email. I don’t think, I think beyond validating his concern, I don’t know if we’ve addressed it,  Jesse: I mean, we..  Peter: …we’ve solved it. Jesse: We haven’t solved this problem. We haven’t solved this problem for him. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s something that we are all doing together as we continue finding our way… Peter: I see what you’re trying to do there. I don’t know if I’m buying it. 

In which an email from a design leader self-labelled “Consultancy Rat” spurs a wide-ranging discussion on strategic design leadership, product management, and the differences between in-house and consultancy design. Topics: consulting vs in-house design; FAANG+; the bifurcation of UX design; product design; design as a handmaiden to engineering; why not both?; product management and product strategy; product management as UX practice from 15 years ago; the craft of product management; making the shift from consultancy to in-house; strategic and principal in-house design roles. Transcript Intro Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse. Good afternoon. On today’s episode, we’ve got a letter from a gentleman named Consultancy Rat, asking us questions about some of the pros and cons or the challenges of shifting from being a design leader in a consulting practice and being a design leader in-house, and some of the challenges and frustrations that he’s experienced.  And, what I can say is that, it led you and I into a bunch of interesting threads talking about in-house design, consulting, design, product management, agile development, principal designers, and a whole bunch of stuff. Jesse: Just say, check it out. There you go. Letter Peter: So, here on Finding Our Way, we’ve asked for listeners to send in their thoughts about what we’re discussing. And we have one from a gentleman who referred to himself as Consultancy Rat. And his email to us goes as follows:  “I have spent the bulk of my design career in consulting (frog and others.) I came up through the design ranks and was promoted into creative direction and management  I generally operate under the assumption that in-house opportunities love to bring in design leaders from design consultancies. However, I am sensing a growing divide between design consulting and in-house design. In-house design seems to be rapidly engineering itself into highly efficient, highly optimized, and highly atomized, quote design, ops unquote  The design students in a master’s program in which I have taught for a few years, increasingly find the notion of production and shipping digital product at FAANG+ (for those who don’t understand, that’s Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, et cetera.) to be the penultimate. Whereas wrestling with ambiguity in new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design craft, working with and amidst other designers, while spreading the gospel of design seems less and less the ideal to most students.  But I find this shift troubling at a community slash craft level as well as the personal level of my career in design leadership.  I would love to hear your perspectives on this, having shifted in your careers from consulting leaders to in-house leaders. Does the shift I am referring to resonate with your experience? If so, do you think the shift is in the correct direction? How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams? I am very much enjoying listening to the podcast and look forward to what’s in store. Thanks a ton for putting it together and out there.” Okay, so that was his email. There’s a lot to chew on there. And Jesse, it sounds like you’ve got, you’re just bursting with responses and notions. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: Set forth! Our Thoughts Jesse: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Rat for sharing your perspective. This definitely resonated with me a lot. This phenomenon that Mr. Rat is seeing from his perspective as a design leader who has worked in consulting who assumed that in-house opportunities would be fairly available to him given the skill set that he’s developed, and now discovering that those in-house opportunities are looking for something different because the practice of design in-house has evolved into something very different than, I think that’s true.  I feel like the term UX, UX designer as a role, and UX as a function in the marketplace, has bifurcated, that depending on the organization that you’re looking at, and depending on the way that they have structured the work that they do and their priorities as an organization, what that UX role is and what that UX function is, can be a couple of very different divergent things. One is UX as our Mr. Rat is describing, as it has been practiced in consultancies, which has to do with highly collaborative blended teams. You’re going through user needs analysis and concept development and lightweight prototyping, this traditional UX process as Adaptive Path taught for many years, as has been taught in a variety of interaction design programs out there over the years. We’ve seen UX blow up into something that a lot of organizations can point to as a real driver of value and really kind of table stakes for them to even be in the market. But this highly collaborative and much more fluid exploration of ideas was not necessarily a clean fit for the way that those organizations went to market generally, especially in these tech companies that he’s talking about, the FAANG+ companies where they are these huge, digital product production lines. And that whole messy bundle of things that we call UX, and consultants continue to practice as UX, it’s really hard to fit into that production line. The production line needs design to be something that is atomic, something that is repeatable, something that is a lot less bespoke, ideally, that can fit designers into a larger process that makes them look as much like engineers or other kinds of interchangeable, replaceable production line workers.  And so this production UX is the UX that you learn if you go to a bootcamp. It’s the UX that you learn in a lot of these “Get your UX certificate in 90 days” kind of programs that are training people for a very specific production job. Which is focused almost entirely on high-fidelity prototyping. And to Mr Rat’s point, the management background required to run that team is something very, very different from the skills that he’s developed as a leader in consulting. But I’d love your thoughts on it as you have been on your own journey with in-house leadership and the transfer of what you learned as a consultant to being an in-house leader. Peter: I think, one, I want to validate Mr. Rat’s thesis. I think what he’s seeing is generally true or a totally fair read on the situation. And Jesse, what you’ve just laid out holds with much of what I’ve seen. There’s, when I first left consulting and went in-house, my first significant in-house job being a Groupon, I inherited a team of product designers who looked at companies like Facebook as the model for how design should work. And that model was largely around visual interaction design, with the ability of these product designers to do some coding so that they could build their own designs. And that was it. That was the the Alpha and Omega of design to these product designers that I inherited. And I was taken aback, because it left out 75% of what I consider design, and not only was this common view of product design much narrower, there was a smug superiority that these in-house product designers had with respect to consulting designers because they shipped stuff, man. They built stuff that people used, and consulting design, you know, you get to work on pretty stuff, you get to work on signature concepts and ideas, but that stuff never gets shipped. And consultants just, you know, hand over a design and then they leave and they’re not there to really put their shoulder in and to get something out the door. And the superior smugness that the product designers had about that I took issue with, but they raised a legitimate point, around one of the big challenges of designing within a consulting context. And part of the reason I left consulting to go in-house was to be where those thousand little decisions are made that affect what ultimately goes out the door.  So, at Adaptive Path, we often were brought in as consultants, because the existing internal team didn’t have the strategic capabilities that design leaders realized they needed for tackling some piece of work. Jesse: Right, right… Peter: We were told, like, we don’t have anything like you in-house, we have a bunch of perfectly good UI designers, but when we need to figure out kind of where we’re headed, we don’t have the horses internally to do that. So that’s why we’re bringing you in. So in-house digital design has, I think, always tended towards production and delivery orientations. And in-house digital design has always found itself as essentially a handmaiden to engineering and development processes. It exists to make technology go; it did not exist to realize new business value. And what’s starting to happen though, and I think there’s some interesting confusion around this, is some companies do recognize that design can unlock new business value. So they’re trying to bring in folks with that bent and that orientation. But then you get this internal conflict or contradiction, where these companies bring in visionary strategic designers to pull the company forward, but the practices for doing that run contrary to the standard practices of a technology-driven or business-driven company. And one of, I guess, three things happens. Often as not, the design leader just decides it’s not worth the fight and figures out how to accommodate with the dominant culture. And so you lose some of that magic. Sometimes the design leader just bounces out. It’s just like, “this won’t work and we shouldn’t have tried this.” And they leave and they go back to old practices. And very rarely, but occasionally, a design leader is, I think, able to unlock and demonstrate a new way of working and help others realize that, yeah, there are other ways of tackling these kinds of problems. That last one is by far the rarest… Jesse: Yeah… Peter: …because it requires culture change and transformation in some of the stuff we’ve talked about earlier. And that’s just–that’s just hard. Jesse: Hard. Slow. Peter: It’s time consuming. And these design leaders are often like, “Why am I spending so much time and effort trying to push this boulder up the hill when I could go somewhere else that actually understands what I’m doing and just do what I do.” What I’m starting to see are at least companies of a certain size, figuring out how they can have their chocolate in their peanut butter. How they can have strategic visionary customer centered design that’s driving new business value. Jesse: Sort of big UX. Peter: Yeah, big UX and the more delivery oriented UI slash UX working in scrum teams executing on the specific features and functionality that need to be shipped.  So I think when you achieve a certain size, and you have savvy enough leadership, there’s a recognition that it doesn’t need to be one or the other. You can have both. But I think what often happens is, particularly in these tech companies, they’ve never been in an environment where there was strategic design. They don’t know what they’re missing. Jesse: Right? Well, yeah, that’s true.  Peter: It’s asking a fish to understand what it’s like to breathe air when all they’ve ever done is breathe water, they’d have no idea what even what you’re talking about. Jesse: There’s another part of this, that I, I feel like I’ve witnessed. I have a feeling you’ve witnessed as well, over the last decade or so, which is the rise of the fetishization of the concept of “product” in the Valley and among those companies that are strongly influenced by what happens in the Valley. The reason that they don’t have experience with strategic design work is that those decisions that would be made in the course of a strategic UX, human- centered design process are being made by these product guys (and they are guys by and large.)  Everybody was trying to figure out the secret of Steve Jobs’ alchemy as a leader, and the consensus that came out of it was that he was the ultimate product guy. He was looking at everything through the lens of how do we compose these software technologies and hardware technologies and all of the new manufacturing processes and all of the different stuff that goes into making Apple’s products and was able to bring that together into a holistic view of what the ultimate product should be that got delivered to people. And so the VCs looking to fund startups got to asking, like, who’s your product guy? Where’s your product guy? And every company started having a chief product officer or a VP of Product or product became a function where it wasn’t before. And all of those things that were already underway as part of strategic design processes, the product guys, which basically this is a role that owns nothing but somehow also owns everything, decided that that piece was the piece that they could own. Which was setting strategic direction and definition of a product vision and north star, those kinds of things. None of them are doing it from a place of design because none of them are designers, none of them have design experience. None of them have design education. They are using the tools that their VC advisors are giving them. And none of those have anything to do with design or, frankly, with human centered principles. Peter: What I find funny, having spoken at a few different product conferences, is how product leaders, on stage, when talking about how they need to develop a craft of product management, end up re-inventing user experience practice from 15 years ago. Jesse: Yeah, because that’s the domain that they’ve claimed for themselves. That’s the… Peter: That’s the problem. Exactly. Jesse: They aren’t aware of all the work that’s been done to actually develop ways to solve these problems. Peter: I think that’s true. I gave a talk, the first time I gave it was at UX Week. It was originally titled “UX is Strategy, Not Design.” The thesis of the talk is that the practices of UX had gotten too closely aligned with design and delivery when in fact, much of the value of user experience work, the research, the prototyping, the ideating, the figuring out what the problem is, was strategic. And when I first gave this talk at UX Week, the first response came from, when she raised her hand, Christina Wodtke said, “What you defined was product management,” and I had not worked with any product managers who worked in the way that I had been discussing, which was around formulating strategy developing customer centered business cases, considering a lot of ideas, figuring out the one and then as you go through delivery, kind of orchestrating that experience. And she said, “Well, that’s product management.” And I’m like, “Not that I’ve ever seen.” And this was a couple years into having left Adaptive Path. What I’ve seen over time, though, is that there is a subtle strain of product management that does do some of these UX things.  You have conferences like Mind The Product and this rise of a community of product managers, and I think what they’ve realized, as they’ve started interacting with one another, is that there is no consistent practice for product management. Over the last 20, 25 years, digital product design, UX design, has developed a practice such that you can take a designer in any one of these companies and they can move to any one of these other companies, and within a week they are able to be productive because the standards and practices of how we do design work have been pretty well established in this industry. You can’t do that with product managers. How a product manager behaves at Facebook is different than how they’re going to behave at Slack, is different thing to how they’re going to behave at Microsoft is different than how they’re going to behave at Google. Product management in each of those organizations is distinct, so I think this community of product managers is trying to figure out what like, what is product management then? And it’s been interesting watching them try to articulate the craft of product management because, until recently, the way that I saw product management was defined, is product management was whatever was left after all the other practices took there bits, right?  So engineers are doing engineering things and designers are doing design things, and business analysts are doing business analyst things and data scientists are doing data scientists things. And now with Scrum, you might have scrum masters and agile coaches and they’re doing their things, and product managers were just kind of filling in the gaps of “What are the activities that no one’s picked up? I guess that’s what I’ll do.” So if you had UI designers, product managers were then doing workflows and wireframes because no one was around to do that. So they thought that was their job. But if you had a UX designer, well, okay, someone’s doing your workflows and wireframes. so what’s my job like? They were trying to find their role, in the space left.  One of the ways they’re defining it is very similar, as we were just saying, to this old-school UX practice, to the degree to which at this conference I was at in Australia last August, which was a product management conference, there was an opening keynote for day two. And he’s talking about his work and how he leads product. And in his 45 to 50 minute talk, he spent a good 10 to 15 minutes talking about the “design the box” exercise as a way to articulate strategy and get a group of people together to understand the direction that we want to take this product in. And Jesse and I conducted “design the box” exercises 15 years ago for clients as a UX, a UX tool… Jesse: Right? Yeah. Peter: …to get a team of people together. Jesse: We were teaching design the box at least 10 years ago, and probably longer ago though.  Peter: in some organizations that more strategic and visionary UX practice is seen as the responsibility of the product person and those product people are usually either technical or business folks. So they’re not doing it, which is why now the design teams are like, “Oh, no one is doing this work. We need to now hire strategists internally, service designers, people internally who can drive that conversation.” So it’s still being figured out. Jesse: That’s great. ‘Cause I have not been hearing about that. I have been hearing mostly about, you know, the trend in the other direction, which is toward production line UX.  Peter: With the 500 designers at Capital One, I’m assuming there were some design strategists in there. I’m assuming that there was an opportunity for people who’d been doing this for 20 years, that they were able to flex their muscles. Did you see that? Jesse: Well, Capital One is a difficult organization to characterize in any holistic fashion because it is a highly federated set of businesses each with their own unique needs, especially from a design perspective. And so the answer to that question simply depends on who you’re working with, depends on what part of the business you’re in and what their needs are, and, how sophisticated their stakeholders are.  To your point about product management seeking its center, there were a bunch of different approaches to product management across different groups at Capital One, and they were all in their cases trying to optimize for the problem that was right in front of them.  Peter: So that’s the product management world, but what about the design world? To what degree were design teams pushing forward… Jesse: Well, the design teams, to your point, design fills the space that product management allows them, because product management is still, you know, calling the shots.  Peter: I mean, the other thing I’ve gotten to learn about product management as a practice, particularly as you get more senior in that role, you’re running product, you’re running a specific product, you’re maybe a director level all up to VP level and above is, it is a really stressful role, because they’ve got stuff coming at them from all sides. And in particular, from the top down. They’ve got executives leaning on them with their expectations of what they’re delivering, usually outcomes, usually metrics. And so the product manager’s just like, “I am accountable to deliver on some set of, OKRs, I’m going to do whatever it takes to make that work. Because I am the one who’s accountable. You all have to listen to me because it’s my butt in the sling if this doesn’t work. So I need to feel that sense of ownership.” So you get that on one side. On the other side, you get, where product managers on one side have executives barking in their ear about what they need and on the other side, have designers barking in their ear the question, “Why? Why? Why? Why?” and they’re kind of in the middle, like, I have to do this thing, this, like, they’re not given enough time in the day.  One of the leading thinkers on product management is this guy, Marty Cagan. And he wrote a book called Inspired, and he says, flat out, product management is more than a full time job. If you’re looking for simply a 40-hour-a-week job, product manager is not the job for you, because in order to do that job right, you need to be able to work 60 hours a week, which is insane. But this expectation is that you’re now this superhero contributor who’s managing all these different functions, all these different sets of expectations. And it feels like the way the job has been defined, or ill-defined, the only way to succeed is if you put in these 60-hour weeks. So it’s no wonder these folks are having their struggles, given the context in which they’re operating. And one of the things I’m looking forward to as this product management community starts to gel and develop its own sense of self, is that they start kind of defending or protecting themselves from these unreasonable expectations that others have on them. We could go down a pretty long rabbit hole there, but I actually want to get back to some of Consultancy Rat’s points… Jesse: Well, I actually do want to ask you a question about product management as it relates to Consultancy Rat, because his central issue is like, “I thought all of this consultancy experience was going to set me up for an in-house job when I get tired of all of the things that come with the consultancy lifestyle, which is also not an easy lifestyle.” And one that a lot of people do for a while, and then they get out of. At some point you want to get out of that hamster wheel, or at least many people do. And so his question is “What are the opportunities that exist for me now as someone with this experience leading design from a consultancy footing.” And it sounds to me like implicit in what you’re saying is that if you want to have that same level of influence, if you want to be engaged in and driving those same strategic processes that you were a part of as a consultant, the place to go in-house is not design, it’s product management. Peter: That is not not true. It’s going to be really hard for a consulting design leader to be seen as a credible product manager. Jesse: Then his other question was, “How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams?” Peter: It depends on the nature of the role that you want in-house. If you want to work in a fashion where the work that you do looks not unlike the work you did as a consultant, i.e., probably more strategic, more big-picture, meatier projects, what you need to do is find companies, and they are usually going to have to be of a certain size, that are hiring principal-level product designers or, as we call them, at one of the companies I’m currently serving, a UX architect. So some of these bigger companies, we have friends at Zendesk who are principal product designers. It is a director-level role, but it’s an individual contributor role and it is meant to be that product strategy, design strategy, experience strategy type of role. Coordinating the efforts of a lot of other people under the umbrella of a single vision and customer journey, some understanding of the experience. So you are starting to see in-house roles that provide that opportunity. Let’s say you’re in a consultancy and you’re a creative director or an ECD, and you’ve got however many people reporting to you and you like that management relationship and you want to do that in-house, that’s in some ways a harder shift to make. Just because I think a lot of companies, whether you’re tech or not even tech, but just companies who are hiring folks for in-house design teams, they are going to default by looking for people who have run in-house design teams. There is a perception, and it’s not untrue there, that the challenges of running an in-house design team and the challenges of running a design consultancy team are different. Occasionally, people make that switch. I’ve seen startups hire as a head of design someone with a consulting background. Usually, that person has been very senior in that consulting capacity and probably most importantly has worked on shipping product, and has had a consulting relationship with a client where they were maybe an agency of record and were able to release a stream of products for a client. Jesse: It’s not just a matter of finding a role that’s a good fit for your skills and experience. It’s also that knowing that you’re not going to fit the mold, you have to be looking for a company that wants to break its mold, it has to be something of a strategic move on the organization’s part to bring you in because you’re not just going to be drag-and-drop into their organization. You’re not going to look like a typical product manager, or you’re not gonna look like a typical production design leader. In either case, you have something else to offer and you need to be working with an organization that recognizes that  something else. I do think also that those opportunities to oversee that design production work definitely still happen. Even in the context of Adaptive Path, I personally have overseen some pretty extensive screen delivery in my day. Peter: This is actually where external recruiters are playing an important role. in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, there’s a couple that we actually mentioned in the org design book. Amy Jackson, Talent Farm, who we worked with, Karen and Marta. There’s a bunch of others. Anyone who was in the position of Consultancy Rat who’s interested in making a shift in-house, recognizing how difficult it’s going to be to just try to submit resumes and portfolios directly to in-house opportunities because that person doesn’t really have the profile that is typical for these in-house opportunities, a recruiter can be, a helpful bridge. These recruiters have relationships with in-house companies. But they often understand the backgrounds and the experiences of consulting designers, and they can make translations for those in-house companies to help them understand how a particular candidate’s consulting experience would translate. Also vice versa. Right? They can help these people with consulting backgrounds. sharpen their story when it comes to how they engage with these in-house opportunities and help them figure out what to focus on in terms of their experience that will resonate with that in-house team. And so, if you’re finding yourself in a situation like this, I would encourage you to work with recruiters, too, as a means by which you can manage that gap between the in-house and consulting worlds. Jesse: And yeah, I think across the board in any kind of transition like this, your storytelling is really essential. but especially as you are potentially making the leap, both from the consulting context to the in-house context, as well as from a more strategic frame to a more delivery-oriented frame. Being able to orchestrate the details of your own story. To be able to sell yourself as a leader is really key. Outro Peter: Our response to Consultancy Rat’s email proved to be longer than we can fit in a single episode. So listen to the next installment of Finding Our Way to hear more of what we have to say about these subjects. In the meantime, you can reach out to us on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg, or through our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you can send us an email and maybe we will spend an hour talking to each other about it.  Something else I’m wondering is whether or not you prefer our episodes to remain in these roughly 30 minute chunks or for something such as this where we have about an hour’s worth of stuff, you would prefer that to just be one hour-long episode. Let us know. And look for that next episode of Finding Our Way. Hidden Track Peter: So you’ve been thinking, you have notes… Jesse: …Tuning up. Oh, well, yes, I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about the letter. I have actually have quite a lot to say about the letter. I’d be surprised if we got to anything but the letter today… Peter: …from Consultancy Rat? Jesse: Yeah. Consultancy Rat. Peter: I think that’s what we call him because– Jesse: No, it’s a, it’s, it’s like when, you know, when people write into Dear Abby or Dan Savage or whoever your favorite advice person is, you give yourself a cute name.