Finding Our Way

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.

In which we discuss the challenges of relationship management when leading from home, and then start a potentially promising discussion on the subject of trust. Keywords: #OaklandSlowStreets, symbolic analysts, listservs, working from home, intent, distributed teams, serendipity, thresholds, conscious incompetence, improvisation, vision, galvanizing, trust, trust, trust. 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. We’re about in our first full week of #OaklandSlowStreets, and that one act that the city has done has measurably increased my mood positively. The major street that is nearest to us, which is this pass through street for a lot of cars because of freeway access, is now a slow street. And it is, throughout the day, overtaken by bicyclists and pedestrians. And it is like a little town square and it is awesome and it just makes me very happy and I just walk up and down it. And I want this to always be there. There are things that we are learning about our neighborhoods and communities in what is otherwise a dark time. I get nervous glowing about some of these things ‘cause I know for a lot of folks that there is almost no upside but there are things we are developing in our communities that I hope we are able to learn from and maintain. Jesse: I agree with you. I think that, despite all of the darkness, despite the, really the, the scale of senseless tragedy unfolding in slow motion all around us, yeah, it is forcing all of us to take a step back from all of the routines and all of the assumptions and all of the scripts by which we have organized our lives and the systems around us. And Oakland Slow Streets is really interesting because it’s an example of the kind of thing we talk about in design all the time, which is, the emotional or psychological effects of system choices on the people who move through those systems. And, we have gotten to a certain level of baseline tolerance of a lot of systems that maybe when those systems come back online, we’re not going to be so tolerant of anymore and we’re going to start asking for different things. And that, I think, is going to potentially create a lot of exciting system-level design opportunities across a wide range of different fields and disciplines and areas of enterprise. Peter: Well, yeah, for all of us symbolic analysts who find ourselves working from home when we would otherwise be in offices, it is unclear why anyone who is a symbolic analyst would be expected to go into an office again, at least every day. The amount of money companies spend on housing people in commercial real estate, that they could probably spend half of that, and just literally hand employees money and say, kit out your house how you see fit. And people could buy nice cameras and secondary displays and standing desks with treadmills or whatever they want. And it would still be far cheaper than housing them with commercial real estate. And that’s one of those where I don’t see how we go back to those assumptions. And it’s funny because in design, so I’m on all these design leadership mailing lists, or community slacks. No one’s on a mailing list anymore. Sorry, I’m showing my age. I’m on listservs. I’m on all these leadership listservs, Jesse: ”design leadership-l” Peter: Hyphen L, of course. You know, that one. And, I’m on all these design leadership community slacks where people are still hiring and people are interviewing and one of them has a channel called a job-search-vent. And right now, the biggest job search vent is how these companies are still expecting folks to live in a particular area, to go to an office every day when we come back from this experience, even though we know folks, at least with the kind of work we’re doing, are doing actually pretty well without going to an office. Jesse: One factor behind the historical insistence on physical colocation is in part because what it would have taken to make that change would have been so disruptive to any organization that attempted it that what would happen would be it would get a bunch of people fired before it actually killed the organization. In this case, the disruption has already happened. So the question is simply, Where do we go from here? Peter: Right, right. Jesse: And I think in a lot of cases, the cultures and the processes of these organizations were so embedded in that physical context that the flexibility to evolve toward the digital and virtual wasn’t there. But having cut all of those processes off rather abruptly, there’s now the opportunity to create something new in their place. Peter: I use the phrase symbolic analysts, and I’m being both, silly, but, particular ‘cause a symbolic —  Jesse: What we used to call knowledge workers, Peter: –workers well and knowledge workers were symbolic analysts. I remember it was like the mid nineties that was the generic term for the kind of work we do. All now the people working on computers doing this type of stuff. And often before this pandemic, there were folks who still worked remotely or would promote their perspective that we should do much more to enable distributed work. And this was my experience when I was leading design at Groupon, I would drive an hour to an hour and a half to Palo Alto to not sit at a desk. I had a desk there, but I wouldn’t sit at the desk. I would go from conference room to conference room to sit on a video call with people in Chicago, Seattle, the cities that we operated, and my entire day from nine to five would be moving from conference room to conference room to be part of conversations where a significant portion of the folks we’re not in the room with me.  Jesse: Right.  Peter: And so work had already gotten to this distributed notion. People– Jesse: And I’ve seen many organizations that work exactly that same. Peter: Yeah. If you, if you look at even people at their desks, they’re often staring at a screen on a call with other people. We were operating in this distributed fashion. We just sat near one another. I’ve come to believe that the reason we were still using offices is because we’d stopped being intentional about that. That was not an intentional decision. In the same way that we work in these bureaucratic hierarchies because it’s how we always have, we worked in offices because that’s how we always have, and we do a bunch of things because it’s how it’s always been done. And now we have a break point. My concern is that too many people will try to return things to the way they were, as if that was better, or superior or natural, instead of really taking stock and taking advantage of how we can operate in new ways that are better suited to our current reality. Jesse: I completely agree with you. And, as this has gone on, I’ve heard that sentiment from more and more people that people are, in their own lives, taking stock and reassessing how they’ve structured their lives and the priorities that have been, to your point, unintentionally, or at least unconsciously, built into those choices. And I can see organizations doing the same thing for sure. Peter: I’m working for a 150 year bank right now, and they’re all having to work from home. And it has been clearly a painful transition for them from an infrastructure standpoint. But I have to imagine that they now are realizing that there are new and potentially better ways of working that they will need to adopt.  Jesse: I want to come back to the cultural issue, around presence in the office because I think this is one that has a particular meaning for leaders in organizations, in that presence in the office for leaders often is about maintaining a certain level of visibility, especially visibility among people that you don’t directly interact with. Maintaining a degree of visibility with your weak ties, with those peers whom you may not be collaborating with day in, day out, but who you see once a month, once a quarter, and who you need to maintain relationships with. Peter: The most obvious casualty of distributed work is serendipity, is the hallway conversation, is running into someone in the break room. And leaders more than other folks within an organization benefit from that, given the nature of their roles. Something we’ve talked about in earlier episodes is how the medium of leadership is relationship. Those relationships are built both through scheduled and intentional interaction, but also through passive serendipitous interaction. And we’re now carving out a significant chunk of that, when you’re looking at things in a purely distributed fashion. That said, in my experience… So my last full time role, at Snagajob, I was part of an office of 30 people in Oakland, and the other 470 people in the company worked in Virginia and South Carolina. And I still felt I had a decent leadership relationship. You know, part of that was, five days a month, I traveled to the largest office and like literally just kind of hang around, sit around, see… Jesse: That’s what I’m talking about though. Like that hanging around has value… Peter: And I made serendipity happen just through my presence. And I would let people know when I was there, “I’ve cleared my calendar, don’t need an agenda, just here to hang out.” But, being distributed doesn’t mean being physically isolated. And that’s where intent becomes important, right? There’s opportunities to pull people together. So as a leader, you can say, “Hey, let’s get everyone together in your org, to meet, and in those company-wide gatherings, you reintroduce those opportunities for serendipity and for unintended connection. Music break Peter: The companies I know that have distributed teams, offhand, the design isn’t great. What ends up happening, I think is, it is harder to build a design culture. And in those distributed workforces, the work gets highly atomized. You get a lot of little product teams doing a lot of stuff. And so the overall quality of design throughout an organization is, on average, lower than I’d like. There might be spikes where certain teams are doing it well, because there’s a good design leader, good designers in that area. But it’s not something that you can generally, across the board bring up.  Jesse: Well, the distributed context places so much emphasis on the communication skills of the team and the ability to clearly get an intent across to a collaborator and be able to receive and incorporate and integrate whatever feedback you get from that. And to be able to handle those volleys of ideas within a team more smoothly. In a physical context that often is a matter of interpersonal attunement, right? So you’ve got a group of designers around the table that are all working together on a problem and everybody is sort of tracking everybody else in these really subtle ways in terms of, “Is everybody on board with this idea? Is there somebody who’s like, maybe resisting it a bit? You get all of this stuff from body language and all of these micro cues that are more available to us in a physical environment that I think leaders are struggling with right now, especially if you’re the kind of leader who makes decisions from a place of synthesizing and integrating these signals of attunement and alignment from your team to be able to say, okay, this feels like the direction that is going to best address the problem as I understand it from the perspectives of all the people in this room right now. When they lose access to that rich real time information source about their collaborators, it becomes a lot harder, and it’s a lot harder to do that over a video conferencing app like Zoom, and it’s even harder to do that when everybody’s attention is focused on something like a virtual whiteboard, and you may only be hearing voices in your head and seeing little pointers flying around on a screen. Peter: The voices. The voices. Jesse: Yes. Peter: In my last role, there was a problem that ended up being localized to the Oakland office. and we addressed it because we were all there and I could be pulled into a conference room in a moment’s notice and say, “Hey, this and that and the other thing isn’t working. There’s some sensitivities. There’s some, personality clashes,” et cetera, et cetera. And you could do five minutes here and five minutes there and you can kind of feel your way through addressing this problem in the moment. Whereas problems that arise among a distributed team, because you need to be so much more intentional and much more explicit in your communications, well, now you need to grab time on someone’s calendar, and when you talk to them, you need to like have your case made about here’s the nature of this problem. And now as the leader, in order to resolve the problem, you can’t just pull people aside. You now have to set up a series of meetings yourself and it just turns everything that could have been handled in a humanistic rhythm…. Jesse: Yeah, and in a graceful and informal and humane way, rather than turning it all into these formalized artificial structures that feels like you’re being sort of fed into this big machine instead of just having a conversation with the person. Peter: And so my concern is that there is going to remain a set of lower-lying problems that don’t hit that threshold, that you as a leader might not even realize are happening, right? That just don’t break through the surface. And then once it does hit this threshold, it becomes this thing that now has to be projectized. Jesse: Yeah. Triggers a whole bunch of sort of formal processes around it that may be totally ill-suited to the nature of the problem at hand. I completely agree with you and I think that this environment makes it particularly important for leaders to be continually pushing down that threshold of how big a thing needs to be in order for their people to come talk to them about it, and for them to be able to feel like they can casually shoot you a DM in Slack and feel like that’s not going to spin up into something that’s completely out of scale with the scale of the problem itself. Peter: Yeah. It might not align appropriately given the nature of the challenge that you’re trying to address. Jesse: I think also for design leaders, this technology introduces new challenges, as remote facilitators of processes and as orchestrators of conversations. And running people through exercises and taking them through the process of generation and synthesis and driving decision making, doing all of those things, in the context of virtual environments is another skillset that most of us are still learning. And, as the tools evolve, we’re going to have to evolve to keep up with them. Peter: Definitely. One of the skills that help designers facilitate those types of conversations is a certain empathetic quality, but also a certain ability to improvise. And one of the challenges, is you still need to improvise. You need to be able to realize in a context of a conversation like, “Oh, we should go in this direction. And I have to put aside the plan that I had and pursue it.”  Running these types of workshops virtually, I find requires me to be way more prepared ahead of time, and understanding what the activities are going to be, how they’re going to proceed. And the challenge is you have to be both more explicit upfront in terms of how you structure the sessions, but you still, you don’t want to be rigid and you still need to have that ability to flex, and that, that’s just harder. I think it’s just harder. Jesse: Yeah, it is harder. And part of it I think, again, comes back to how closely are you able to stay in tune with the other people that you are collaborating with? And how, are you able to track their reactions moment to moment to the evolution of the ideas? And, that improvisation is such an important skill. Peter: Design leaders are kind of being thrusted back almost into conscious incompetence like they’re having to start over their practices and what works and the things that they had internalized that they could kind of rely on. They’re now having to call into question, much as we said at the very outset like how businesses are having to call into question some fundamental aspects of how they operate. And it would be interesting to consider what are those aspects of leadership practice had become unconscious or subconscious that are now needing to be made explicit again. And I think one of them is this ability to improv. It’s this ability to flow. It’s this ability to react and realize something that has bubbled up, an issue has developed or an opportunity has arisen, and now you’re going to lean forward and tackle that. Jesse: You got me thinking again about this great reset that is happening at all scales. It’s happening at the scale of the individual as individuals are reassessing how they relate to their lives and the world and purpose and meaning and all those kinds of things, that’s happening at the scale of small groups of people, whether those are families or teams or whatever and the whole reconsideration of how those interaction patterns work. And then it’s happening at the larger scale of larger organizations and eventually institutions and governments and whole societies. So, I think that what you’re talking about is one expression of a larger reconsideration of everything that is happening. I think that this may be an area where a newer leader has certain advantages in that they haven’t yet had the opportunity to build up a lot of habits and practices that are rooted in the pre-distributed context. Music break 2 Peter: So I’m thinking about this in the context of a particular initiative that I ended up being responsible for when I was at Groupon, about six months into my time there, I was told by my boss, the SVP of Product, that in six weeks time he was expecting me to present at the company all hands to all 12,000 employees a vision for the future Groupon shopping experience. It’s one of those things, it wasn’t out of the blue. It had been bubbling, but it was like, now is the time. Because he was looking at the whole calendar of 2013. We show a vision in April, and then by October of that year, five months later, we start launching the first steps towards realizing that vision. And we wanted to get those first steps out before the holiday break. as eommerce, ecommerce is very seasonally minded. And we did a code freeze, basically, right before Thanksgiving. And so, he had done a lot of work to develop a product strategy. And so it’s like, we know the product strategy. Make that go. And he was looking to me to lead that. I, in turn, thankfully had hired an extremely capable design director, who’s now the head of design at Doordash, Helena Seo, I leaned on her and I’m like, I’m still running a design organization, so I can’t spend all of my time doing it. I think I was able to devote about a quarter of my time over those six weeks to this, but I tasked her and she in turn had one or two other designers supporting her, and it was kind of their 50% plus job building this vision, and the vision was simply going to be essentially a series of comps that told a story of a future experience. Part of why we were able to succeed is after that conversation with my boss, I could go over to her desk and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about a thing.” We could start that planning. She could go to two people who worked near her and she could say, “Hey, we’re going to be doing this together.” And the bulk of the effort took place between the four of us, co-located working every day, moving this thing forward.  Now I’m coaching, this design leader who wants to prepare a similar vision, his ability to pull together a skunkworks, a strike team to do that is just way compromised because now all of this stuff, again, has to hit that threshold of “It’s a project” and, it was a project for us, but we were still able to be kind of off the books and scrappy about it. Jesse: It’s hard to feel scrappy when you’ve got an official Jira board. Right. Peter: Yeah. And, as I’m thinking about what this leader is going to try to do, it’s just not going to be as flow-y as I had it when I was in a similar situation six or seven years ago, and I could just pull together this little strike team to make it happen. Jesse: Yeah, I agree with that. It seems like for design leaders it’s going to be really key to find ways to create those opportunities for serendipity, opportunities for serendipitous interaction, whether with their peers or amongst the members of their teams. And also to try to find ways to culturally encourage and technologically enable more kind of looser ad hoc conversations, you know? There was a time not too long ago when people would just pick up the phone and call you without having scheduled anything to have a three minute conversation about something and then hanging up the phone when they’re done. And this was a common way that a lot of human interaction happened in the 20th century in business. And we managed to have those ad hoc conversations in these relatively informal ways, still using distributed technological tools. Peter: Slack is not a means for galvanizing, I don’t think.. That, that doesn’t mean… Jesse: …Tell me what you mean by galvanizing in this way…? Peter: Galvanizing, right? How do, how do I get two, three, four people together and light a spark and make work happen and seed… Jesse: You’re talking about activating groups of people as opposed to individuals. Peter: Yeah. Slack is great once those groups have been identified and you need to give them a tool to enable their ability to work together. But to spin up, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, maybe people are doing this on Slack, but, to me, that feels very much like a face-to-face, that could be distributed-face-to-face, but face-to-face set of interactions or, or at least voice-to-voice interactions. Right.  Jesse: It sounds to me like what you’re yearning for is a way to gauge and help create buy-in for people that you want to get motivated, get excited, get engaged, pour their energy into what you’re putting forward. And what I hear you saying is that that’s a lot more difficult to do in a text chat environment as opposed to face to face or even a phone call. Peter: I suspect so. A few episodes ago, we talked about leadership rarely has authority. Leadership is about influence. Management is about authority. And so the manager approach to activating and galvanizing is, “John. Mary. Joseph, you are now working on this thing, go!” and they’re like, “Okay, it’s my job. This is what I do.” You’re not going to get the best work out of John, Mary and Joseph in that context. You know, we know that people work best when they feel that connection to purpose. That’s why we spent so much time talking about purpose. We know that people work best when they feel like there is a higher order mission, and opportunity that they are realizing. People work best when they feel self-directed, when it doesn’t feel like someone has told them what to do, but someone has said, “Hey, here’s this really amazing opportunity to make significant change.” And that person now is like, “I’m in because I want to be part of an amazing opportunity.” And that’s what I mean by galvanizing. That type of galvanizing is done through, I mean, you’re now starting to speak to their emotions. You’re trying to speak to their higher selves. And I think, you know, an all-caps shout out on Slack doesn’t spur that kind of followership that’s that passionate, engaged, “I’m in” quality that face-to-face does. Jesse: I think that trust is an element in this too, that the real-time, face-to-face interaction provides for the opportunity to build some trust in the relationship. That is, again, not impossible to do through other channels, but just harder because we have less access to the physiological cues of emotional states that help us stay attuned to one another from moment to moment. And in the absence of that, it can be hard for team members to really fully buy into a leader’s vision at a deep emotional level because the leader doesn’t have the ability to calibrate the communication of that vision to the emotional responses that the leader is getting to in that improvisational fashion. So the ability to have an improvisational conversation with somebody where you are responding moment to moment, to their emotional reactions, to what you’re saying, is how you build that baseline of trust that is going to allow both the team member and the leader going forward to trust in each other’s intentions. For the team member to feel like the leader has a vision that they can invest in, that they can believe in and for the leader to feel like the team members get it enough that they can turn their back and trust that that thing is going to go where they wanted it to go. Peter: All I have to say to that is, is yes to all that.  One of the things that we don’t do enough within organizations is earn our team members’ trust, earn our employees’ trust. Oftentimes we approach things from a stance of assuming trust, that if I am engaging with you, I assume you trust me. And in fact, trust has to be earned. It has to be earned over time, particularly when you’re dealing with these types of sensitive emotional aspects of meaning, of purpose, of connection, of engagement, you can’t assume trust. If you start by assuming trust, you’re not going to get anywhere almost from the outset. And it’s funny cause trust has to be two ways, right? The individual needs to trust the organization, that the organization is living up to that purpose that it is talking about. And that their effort is connected to that higher purpose. It’s one thing when a company is selling these humanistic values of community and neighborhoodliness and all that. And then you find out that they treat their workers terribly. If anyone’s trust is to be assumed, it is the employee’s trust. Whereas the company tends to think their trust is the one to be assumed and that employees… Jesse: Right…  Peter: … have to earn the company’s trust, right. Through their performance and through their effort. And I would argue it’s exactly the opposite…  Jesse: …Showing up at the office… Peter: Yeah. And I would argue it’s the opposite, that companies need to earn team members’ trust because so often team members have been taken advantage of by the companies that they work for. Organizations, companies, individuals, leaders don’t pay nearly enough attention to trust that they should. Even more than purpose and meaning, and some of these other things, trust is as, if not more, important and far less well understood. It’s almost never made explicit. It’s almost like we’re wary of bringing trust into the 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 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…  With this strange fractured conversation that I think reflects a certain reality of our world today. Trying to keep on top of a bunch of different threads in new ways, in new contexts. That wraps up another episode of “Finding Our Way.” We thank you for taking the time to listen to what we have to say. We look forward to your thoughts and input. We are happy to announce that as of this recording, we actually have a website, https://findingourway.design/ Probably the best way of getting a hold of us. There’s a contact form there. It’s also where you can find all past episodes and, links to podcatchers and all that kind of good stuff, how to subscribe. So, find us there, send it to your friends. And, we look forward to having you join us on our journey as we continue finding our way. Jesse: Finding our way. Thanks Peter. Peter: The sound is so much warmer now. Can’t you tell? Jesse: Yeah. It’s like you’re right inside my head. Peter: Either that or it’s because I’m using my FM DJ voice? Jesse: You seem to be in good spirits today. They are all computers now. I think, actually that’s not true. I know someone who was an FM DJ, so… Peter: But, but at this point, Alexa could basically run radio across the country and most people wouldn’t care. Jesse: No. Most people wouldn’t notice. Yeah. Peter: I guess I’m in good spirits. I find that my spirits track with the quality of sleep. I had a good sleep, so I’m in good spirits. Jesse: Mm. Excellent. Well, that’s good. Peter: Yeah. I’m pretty simple. Jesse: Yeah. Well, you know, on some level we all are. Right.  Peter: if we had known where we were going with this conversation, we could have invited that design leader focused on distributed teams and…  Jesse: if we had known where we were going for this conversation, we never would have gotten here. Peter: And maybe that’s for next time.

Explore how establishing a clear purpose shapes design teams and their mission statements. Discover the balance of leadership dynamics, fostering collaboration while embracing creative input. Learn about setting internal norms and defining success through accountability and empathy. Understand the importance of aligning values with success metrics to enhance recruitment and team commitment. Lastly, delve into the role of designers in community building and the significance of diverse backgrounds for a more impactful design influence.

In this episode, explore the challenges design leaders face while building cohesive teams. Discover the balance between personality traits and leadership effectiveness. The importance of salesmanship and communication takes center stage, as confidence and self-awareness are highlighted. Transitioning from designer to leader is examined, stressing the need for intentional relationship building. Lastly, listeners are invited to reflect on the complexities of leadership and a film that resonates with younger audiences.

In which reflections on the coronavirus pandemic spark a freeform conversation ranging from Trump to Jobs on management, leadership, power, uncertainty, and more. Transcript 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. As always, I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. Good afternoon. How are you? Jesse: I’m, I’m, doing well, all things considered. Yeah– Peter: And there, there’s a lot to consider…  Jesse: There is a lot, there’s a lot of context. Just a lot. We’ve got some extra context these days for everything. Peter: It’s funny. I haven’t had enough time to go meta on the current situation, but I think there is, there’s something about this situation that is interesting and revealing. My normal mode would be to reflect on it and I just haven’t had time to do that. Have you been able to step back and think about what we might be learning through this uncommon experience? Jesse: Oh, wow. That’s a, that’s kind of a big question. I, so just as a point of reference, for our listeners’ context, it is Thursday, March the 26th, 2020. And so that’s where we are in the overall timeline of this extraordinary year, as it has just begun to unfold for us. And you know, I don’t think anybody really can get enough distance on any of this yet to extrapolate learnings from it, except for some very broad learnings about the systemic nature of cause and effect in our modern globalized world. The ways in which systemic structures and the choices that we make in our individual lives are actually intertwined in terms of the outcomes that they create. And, I think that when we look at the differences in how the Covid–19 virus has propagated across cultures and across societies, and the dramatic differences that we’ve seen across the various countries in which the pandemic has taken hold, come back to issues of culture, issues of governance. Frankly, a lot of the stuff that we’re interested in talking about here at the scale of design and design leadership, but really at the global scale. There are these factors at play that influence how an event like this unfolds, that are hard to see in advance because they are these second order, systemic kind of effects. And then it ends up expressing itself in these really unusual ways. Just before we started recording, I was watching video of, you know, in cities all over the world, there are parks and plazas and public squares that have resident populations of feral animals that rely on the presence of humans to sustain their populations. And now there are these packs of animals kind of roving the empty streets of cities around the world looking for tourists to give them bread. And there are none coming. And so it’s a schooling in unintended consequences that has really just begun. Yeah. Peter: Raccoon apocalypse. Um, one of the things that this has done is make evident different kinds of leadership, and different responses that leaders can have in situations that are kind of revealing. There’s the leadership as demonstrated by President Trump, there’s the leadership demonstrated by Governor Gavin Newsom here in California. As Covid was starting to land in the United States, Trump’s leadership mode was to tell people what he thought they wanted to hear, which sometimes can be an okay strategy depending on the seriousness of the incident, but in this case was not the right strategy because telling people what they wanted to hear did not allow them to prepare as they needed to for the reality. This was in marked contrast to here in California, governor Gavin Newsom, who came out in front of this very early on and started talking about the seriousness and how we’re going to need to start shutting things down and that this is going to take awhile and, his leadership approach was to be upfront with the citizens of California, and he told us stuff we didn’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear that I’m going to have to be in my house for weeks, if not months, on end. But it is good for me to hear that if that is the reality, if that is a reality that I need to get accustomed to and start preparing for. Right. And thinking about design leaders, I was in a session yesterday where we were talking about “radical candor.” And, there’s a book by that title by Jill Scott. And, you know, the idea behind radical candor is that you are forthright, you are frank with people, with the situation, the issues in play. You are respectful. You are not aggressive. You are not rude or mean, but you are direct, because it is through that communication of information that we are able to understand the situation and then develop strategies for getting better. Whereas a more common approach, probably the most common approach that I’ve seen in design teams and with design leaders is what she refers to as “ruinous empathy,” which is, because we want to be nice to one another—and designers, at least the ones I’ve worked with, often tend towards the nice, the polite, the pleasant—because we want to be nice to one another, we don’t tell people what they need to hear. We instead tell them what they want to hear, and they don’t realize that they might be underperforming or that this work could be done better or that somehow they are not reaching their potential. And so then these folks end up stuck at a particular level and they’re not growing because in order to get them to grow, we would have to critique them and tell them that they are not measuring up, and that would be not nice. And we kind of get in our own way in doing that, and so it was interesting to think about these leadership styles, both at the micro level of teams and at this macro level of states and societies. Jesse: You know, and I would argue that, what all of that comes back to is, how effective are the interpersonal skills of the leader. You know, obviously there’s a lot to be said for, you know, vision and operational acumen and all of those kinds of things that are, that are asked of leaders. But I think, in order to mobilize people around a common cause, people who have a diverse range of skills to bring, a diverse range of perspectives, to mobilize them around a common cause requires being able to speak to them in ways that resonate with them and bring them along. And that’s something that design leaders get used to doing in the context of defending design work as designers, and then as they are elevated to leadership, they sometimes kind of lose their way a little bit, in terms of knowing how to bring people along with ideas that aren’t design concepts. Peter: I would say there’s a difference there. I guess it’s easy to react in a situation and provide a rationale as you said, a kind of defense of something that you have created. It can be harder to proact, right, when there isn’t a thing to react to, but you have an idea of where things should be headed.  And it can be very, disconcerting for folks to make that kind of commitment. And I think particularly for design leaders who often feel disempowered, feel like they don’t have access to enough levers to ensure that they are able to see what their vision is forward. To that, I guess I would say don’t worry about that disempowerment. Our job, particularly as design leaders, is to articulate a clear vision forward, and work with our peers and in the organization to figure out how to rally towards that goal. Jesse: I’m interested in this idea of reactivity because I think that it is something that can be a challenge to navigate as one is moving into leadership for the first time or early in the journey of being a leader, of figuring out how much to react versus how much to push against the organization or against your team. Right. How much are you a first responder there to put out the fires and clear the path for design, like you’ve talked about in your work as a design leader, versus how much do you push. So you’re a leader, you have some authority. That means you have some permission, some latitude, to take steps as you see fit.  But if driving organizational change is a necessary part of driving success for your design team, then you have to be sort of working at the edges of that permission. You have to be working along the boundaries of your authority as it is currently defined in order to orchestrate the new, to draw the organization toward what it is eventually going to become. And so there’s a balance there that I see leaders having to walk between. Being what has been asked of you versus being what the organization actually ultimately needs. Peter: I think what you highlighted, which I hadn’t quite thought of in this way, is that most design managers are design managers and probably a very small subset of them are truly design leaders, because I think that leadership is about pushing against those boundaries, taking people into, if not unknown territory, less well known territory, less well understood territory, taking them to someplace uncomfortable, with the idea that that is where ultimately success will be realized.  Leadership can kind of happen almost at any level as long as that person is demonstrating these qualities of pushing, of challenging, of coercing, persuading, bringing people along towards something new that they might not be familiar with. Jesse: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. At Adaptive Path, we saw inside a lot of organizations, where the power in the room and the power on paper were two very different things. And it had to do with the level of respect and trust that people had for the viewpoints of certain people and how effectively those people use their power. And people who were able to cultivate a broad base of respect and trust and were able to use their power in responsible ways, were able to maintain that power without necessarily being in a position of authority. Power may be a different thing again, I guess that when I’m talking about power here, I’m talking about the ability to influence an outcome. Peter: Right. A manager’s impact is through their granted authority, and a leader’s impact is through the adoption of a new mindset that continues without them needing to be around. Jesse: Yeah. When we talk about, maybe not the manager versus the leader, but management versus leadership, there are management oriented responsibilities that people have. And then there are leadership, I think, opportunities. I think in a lot of cases people can be set up to fail if they are, given a management mandate for a leadership problem, it’s like having the ops team lead your strategy development. They’re great at a different thing, and this is not that thing. Peter: This actually reminds me of an experience I had last year, in support of Kaiser Permanente. One of the things I learned, and I was working with a consultant there, who had a master’s degree or a certificate in change management. And when we work in design, we often think about change management, right? As designers, one of the things we are doing is helping people imagine new futures and then figuring out how do we get to those new futures. So there’s actually a reasonable connection or overlap with the act of design. But one of the things she pointed out, is that oftentimes people apply change management practices to what is actually transformation management. And this speaks to kind of what you were saying before, where you will apply management approaches to what is actually a leadership problem. People will apply change management approaches to what’s a transformation problem. And there’s a fundamental difference between change and transformation. Change management is going from a to B, where B is known. They call it agile transformation, but it’s an agile change basically, right? We are currently working in waterfall. We’re going to work in agile. We’re going to now change to people broken up into squads of eight. They’re going to work in these two weeks sprints, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So you’re going from one known to, another known, even if you haven’t practiced it yet, you generally know where you’re headed. Transformation management is where you’re going from a current state of known to, you don’t know, it is unknown where you’re headed. And, If you apply change management practices to transformation management, what you end up doing is trying to, I think you said, kind of operate your way towards a new future and that just doesn’t work. It ends up getting rejected because you don’t know where you’re headed and you need a different set of practices to transform. But the uncertainty in transformation ends up often running contrary to an organization’s desire for certainty. So they apply the change management approach, because there’s a certainty implied in the change management approach. Transformation management, you don’t actually know where you’re going to end up. That’s kind of the point. So you get this conflict of certainty and uncertainty fighting one another. And the certainty usually wins, right? Cause the certainty is part of the dominant existing culture. And the attempts to create something new gets squashed because it requires an organization to live in the uncertain for longer than they’re comfortable. Jesse: Right. Peter: And then, it just gets rolled back and it never happens. Jesse: Yeah. Certainty wins out because certainty is comfortable and certainty makes the fear go away and executives carry a lot of fear around, all the time. It’s just sort of the nature of the job. This is interesting though, because this connects back to something that you were talking about earlier when you were talking about the design leader pushing the organization into the unknown. And what I got from what you were saying was that it is always the design leader’s role to be pushing the organization in these ways. And I wonder how true that actually is because I can see that being true in a startup environment, where the goal is to invent the product as you go and to discover your market opportunity as you go. And certainly that same pushing into the unknown was an important part of Adaptive Path’s value proposition to its clients as well as a part of our internal culture to continue to innovate our practices and keep inventing new stuff. But I find myself wondering if it’s not mostly the case for most design leaders that the job doesn’t really ask for this kind of boundary pushing stuff. It asks for them, you know, to run the team and to run the team really well. Do you think that’s true? Peter: Yes, and that’s fine, especially when you get to a larger organization in a more stable organization. It’s about keeping that organization humming and running, and so you’re tweaking and you’re fiddling and you’re trying to, you know, continue to improve effectiveness. But if we’re going to be talking about leadership as we did last time, as a practice and a craft, I think we have to recognize that leadership is distinct from management in terms of that pushing. And in my experience, and I think this is true of most of the design managers I know, while most of their job is management, for most of them, there’s at least 10%, 20% of their job that should be leadership. They might not all be embracing that opportunity, which is a separate issue, but I think that opportunity does exist. One of the things I’m starting to see a lot more is design managers, directors, senior directors, who are bringing on principal designers. So, these are kind of director-level designers, but who are not expected to manage people, but expected to be a creative leader in a realm of work. Because I think these design managers and executives even recognize that they don’t have the time, the bandwidth to do the creative leadership as well as the executive engagement and the people management and all the other things that are expected of them. Jesse: It’s interesting because there are some leaders that I think really start to run up against limitations in terms of their potential to grow and to move up in organizations because they are able to practice the relationship building and the management and the alignment and the orchestration and the leadership within the context of their own teams. But then when they have to do that outside of the context of design process and design decisions as they are representing design on a larger stage, they become uncertain about where their power is and they become uncertain about, “How do you use it effectively?”  It kind of comes back to something that we were talking about earlier about how people end up becoming design leaders in the first place, which is that the skills that got you the job aren’t necessarily the skills that are gonna let you keep the job. Peter: Right. a challenge that many design leaders have that might be somewhat unique to design compared to other functions, is that their peers and their bosses say they want new thinking, new ways of working, the creation of new value that design can bring through its practices. But then, as designers or design leaders attempt to deliver on that, it pushes the organization into this uncomfortable and uncertain realm. And there’s this snapback, where it’s like, “Wait, whoa, whoa. When I said we wanted innovation, I didn’t mean that. I meant something that I could put on a spreadsheet and better understand and you’re giving me something that is different than that.” And I think this is in part because companies are still trying to figure out what to do with this function that is design, and how to, for lack of a better phrase, capitalize on it. I think there’s this internal conflict where like they want one thing and they asked for one thing, but then when you give it to them, they pushed back and they get upset. And so you don’t do it, and then they’re mad at you because now you’re not delivering the innovation that they asked for. And, and, they don’t realize that the people outside of design don’t often realize that they’re getting in their own way when it comes to what they’re asking for. And that leaves design leaders who are often not particularly well versed in navigating these types of things, their heads are just spinning, trying to figure out what is expected of them, and then it becomes easy to retrench or retreat into that which is safe, which would be the management aspects of their role. Jesse: I feel like the things that you’re describing are almost artifacts of this stage in the development of UX as a practice, if you are a design leader in an organization that hasn’t had design before and you are trying to engage with a whole bunch of peers and stakeholders who have never had to engage with design before. You are, by definition, trying to pull the organization into a new place, which by definition is going to be uncomfortable for people and it’s going to require a great deal of diplomacy.  I wonder at what point we start to turn a corner where those fights become less and less relevant because you don’t have to do so much of that educating, bringing people along, helping them figure out how to talk to you in a way that helps them get what they want from you. Peter: I appreciate and wish for what you say to be true. I am dubious of that happening anytime soon and I’m dubious for that to be happening anytime soon because a challenge that I believe design has in these organizations is that it is a function unlike literally any other in that it is this kind of creative function, that is being granted some measure of real influence and authority. There’ve been creative people in organizations for a long time. But often, it was designers maybe in a marketing context who received a brief, executed on the brief, and weren’t really driving the business in any meaningful way. They were executing on a fairly narrow remit, in some small part of the business as needed. And now design as a function, and it’s a practice is being brought in one or two levels below the CEO with real executive authority, with large teams that cost a lot of money to hire, and with real influence over the success of a business in terms of the nature of their output driving core fundamental business value.  The issue there though is that the dominant cultures of these businesses tend to be mechanistic, analytical, reductive, business driven, numbers driven. Engineers and MBAs, frankly, share a mindset of how to approach problem framing and problem solving, which is, which is fairly analytical and rigorous and, and detail oriented and predictable and certain. It’s a lot about removing uncertainty and, and being certain, but I think there’s this feeling in many organizations, it might even be unconscious, that those approaches have reached their limits. And design seems to offer an opportunity to unlock new value. And so they’re bringing design in ‘cause they, they want that innovation. They want that magic. They want whatever design has to offer, but they don’t recognize that when they’re asking for design to enter into these contexts that they’re bringing in a fundamentally, deeply different way of looking at the world, approaching the world, framing problems and solving problems that isn’t analytical. it tends to be more, synthetic, more generative, more creative, more experimental, less certain. It’s not blasé, it’s not dismissive to business realities and a need to generate value. It’s just a different way of getting there. And it is deeply in conflict with that dominant culture. And so, I am hopeful that we can get to what you’re asking for. I think the way we get there though is when more and more people with design backgrounds are in senior enough positions of leadership and recognize, the opportunity and the potential of this, what can feel uncomfortable, approach and give it the space to deliver as it can. And until then, design is going to find itself straitjacketed. I don’t know how much education you can do of existing broader organizational leadership, versus, is this one of those things that we just need kind of a new generation of leaders… Jesse: Right. Peter: …be okay with this lack of certainty, right? I mean, we’re coming out of 120 years of Taylorism, and management science, that was all about breaking things down to their details and creating repeatable, efficient processes, and design runs highly contrary to that. And it’s going to take a while before this more creative, generative, uncertain approach to value delivery is appreciated by these organizations. Jesse: It feels like what you’re describing is, this thing of, like, caging the wild beast. Right, this natural creative force of design that we’re trying to figure out how to, like, fit it into this Taylorist mechanistic metropolis like, sorry, mega-machine, that we can take this wild organic element and kind of plug it into somehow. And I find myself wondering whether the wild beasts can ever be truly tamed, or if it is always like, “Are you the zookeeper from now on?” Basically, regardless of how the organization’s changed, and is design always going to bump up against the practical mindedness that is necessary for successful management of a business. Peter: I don’t think so because I think much of that wildness can be practiced safely; practice safe wildness.  You know, thinking about Apple, particularly under Steve Jobs, because he obviously understood design, had a passion for design, and was willing to let that uncertainty manifest as long as necessary until the uncertainty eventually turns that corner and becomes something that is now more certain and feels real. There’s a way to approach it where you do it in a safe context where you’re not, you’re not launching this stuff. You’re not shipping this stuff. but you’re trying a bunch of stuff. You’re iterating on it. You’re weeding out 99, possibly 99.9% of the ideas until you get to those germs that catch on and then you’re building on that. And, that requires a degree of patience, a degree of confidence that most leaders simply don’t have. But, if you can see it through to that point, Apple demonstrates what the potential is of allowing that unbridled energy to be realized. Jesse: You know, one of the adjectives you’ll see most frequently associated with his name is mercurial. In that, yesterday’s great work is suddenly not good enough today. and the ways in which he would let people know that, not necessarily the most constructive… Peter: No, I, and I’m not going to, I have no desire to be a hagiography of Jobs… Jesse: …and, and this is I, yeah, no, I know that that’s not–. And my point was simply that, Jobs often, famously, couldn’t tell you exactly what he wanted until he saw it. But as soon as he saw it, then he knew and was, was very decisive in that respect. But it’s almost like the vision was actually sort of a created out of the best little bits of work of many different people rather than Steve Jobs being able to picture the whole thing in his head and then just like giving direction to a team, which is how I think people thought he was working.  Peter: That’s right. One of the interesting things about Jobs is how little vision he actually had. He was not imagining… Jesse: Yeah.  Peter: …these crazy futures. He didn’t come up with the graphic user interface, but when he saw it at Xerox PARC, he realized that is where things are heading, and figured out a way to take something someone else had come up with, and he figured out how to evolve that into something that would be accessible for everybody. But you’re right. He needed other people to show him that vision. And this kind of gets back to designers, right? When they’re working best, they are creating visions, most of which are bad. Maybe not bad, but, but, but, but ineffective or infeasible or not going anywhere… Jesse: Not right. They’re just not right in one way or another. Yeah. Peter: One of the challenges that companies that want to quote “be like Apple” have, is that their leaders aren’t able to navigate all these quote, “not right” ideas, to realize what are the right ones, the pearls within there, that are worth investing in. Jesse: Yeah. Well, one of the things that comes through in the various anecdotes about Jobs is, that one of his superpowers was discernment that, in a wide range of different areas, whether that was visual design or industrial design, or the nuts and bolts of software and hardware architecture, he had the ability to wrap his head around a problem well enough to be able to tell the difference between a good solution and a bad solution in a wide range of different areas. And he was able to use that skill to orchestrate the work of all of these different people toward something that eventually added up to a compelling product. So I think that that cultivation of discernment, that development of taste on the part of the leader, is an essential part of that orchestration of vision. Peter: I would like to think that, that quality of discernment exists in the world in many people. Jobs had developed it and refined it. I’d never considered discernment, as you phrased it, as its own skill, but, it is, there’s a quality there that can be developed though some people probably have a higher amount of it or a higher degree of it than others, as an inclination and, how can an organization identify its higher discerning individuals and engage with them, grant them some degree of influence and authority to practice that discernment, in value to the business. Jesse: That is an interesting question and I think an excellent place for us to leave off and… Peter: The biggest question we’ve had so far, and we’re just…  Jesse: …something deep to think about. I’m just going to let it hang there. I’m going to sleep on it. For, for a bit. Thank you so much, Peter. This has been wonderful. I think it’s probably time for the outro. Peter: I believe it is. So, once again, Jesse and I thank you for listening to another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, we are interested in hearing from you, whether through Twitter, email, carrier pigeon, whatever means you have at your disposal, let us know what you think about the show, or let us know what you would like us to talk about. We want to be open and responsive to this community, as we feel it’s not just Jesse and I finding our way, but all of us finding our way together. Jesse: Finding our way. Thanks, Peter. Peter:   Nope. Nope. That just didn’t work. That didn’t work. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I feel like Orson Welles yelling…  Jesse: I thought you were doing, I thought it. I thought it was…  Peter: It was going for awhile and then I, I spun out and feel again, like Orson Welles… Jesse: We know a farm in the South of England. Sorry… Peter: What is this fucking drivel! Why am I reading this shit? 

In which a discussion of David Epstein’s book Range leads to a consideration of craft, practice, and the medium of leadership. Transcript Jesse: On that note, would you like to take us out? Peter: I never took us in. Jesse: I know. Well, you can do the intro first if you like. [theme music] 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 am Peter, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hi, Peter.  Peter: So I actually was wondering, are you on Twitter at all right now? Jesse: Am I on Twitter? Intermittently? Obviously, there’s a lot there that, at some point you have to turn it off, but yes. Peter: I’m asking cause I recently posted to Twitter, I’m reading the book Range by David Epstein. Are you familiar with this book? Jesse: No, I don’t know this book. Peter: So it’s a book that basically makes a case for generalists in a world of specialisms. and there’s a lot of different stories about a lot of different things, but the basic theme is, people should sample many different things before choosing what it is they do, work-wise. And it also talks a little bit about where I’m at, is kind of “career winding.” And anyway, the reason I bring it up, the reason I tweeted about it, is it has caused me to reflect on design and engineering programs in colleges and it kind of reaffirmed my distaste in undergraduate design and undergraduate engineering programs as they get people to focus in on something fairly narrow early on before they actually understand what is out there. I’m wondering what you think. Jesse: Oh, well, I mean, so there are several different ways that we could go with this. You know, generalism versus specialism is, I think, an interesting thing, especially as you think about how you scale design teams and different approaches that, that we’ve seen taken to, to that question of how much generalism versus specialism do you encourage or support on your teams, and how do you structure your teams to support each of those different types of designers? I have my own complaints about design education and how design education is done. And we can certainly– Peter: That’s probably a whole other episode.  Jesse: There was a, there, there was a phrase that you used in there that I’m curious about. You, you said “career winding,” is that what you said? Tell me more about that.  Peter: Well, in the context of this book, he talks about how within society, there’s this assumption that it’s better to lock into a career choice earlier on and then hammer away at that. Right? You go to school, you’re pre-med ‘cause, you know, you want to be a doctor and you just kind of stay on that path. And one of the things he points out is that that’s actually not true in terms of that being the best way. And oftentimes many of the people who are most successful are folks who did, maybe not very different things, but different things in their career before landing on whatever it was that, this idea of matching your interests and the career world. And the issue is when you specialize or determine too early before you’ve had a chance to explore, your match might be off. And so one of two things happens. You either continue persisting in a path that you just don’t like, but you end up doing it anyway, or you end up feeling, you, you at some point you just break and you move to something else and then take on a lot of guilt about that. And, I, you know, as I’m reading this book, one of the things that I find myself reflecting on occasionally is, is how, when we started Adaptive Path, none of us had formal design degrees. We all had different backgrounds. And I think that is something that has been lost in successive waves of design and designers, kind of creating designers. That as design has gotten more professionalized, as more and more universities offer design degrees, we’re missing that generalist. Liberal arts or even engineering, whatever.It was, science background that people who, when we came up, there weren’t design degrees, so we had to have one of those backgrounds anyways. But I actually think it’s a, I think there is something lost, when folks aren’t able to draw from a broader foundation before choosing to focus in design. The last thing I’ll say that’s kind of more relevant perhaps to the theme of our podcast is one of design leadership. You know, I think, as a designer grows, and this is one of the key things that Range points out, is that when you get a design degree or an engineering degree, you are immediately worth more in the market because you have a marketable skill. But over time, people with more generalist backgrounds actually catch up to and surpass folks with more specialist education. and I suspect it’s because it’s easier for them to grow in kind of management and leadership capacities because they’re able to oversee a breadth of activity. Whereas if you’ve been on this narrow. Design or engineering track from day one it’s harder for you to interact with, engage with or oversee other functions. Jesse: I can see that. I can see that. I think also, that overseeing a multiplicity of functions requires a certain flexibility and adaptability of mindset and of management style. That someone who has previously worked in a variety of different roles or functions is going to have a little bit more of that kind of facility than someone who has come up within a single function in the organization. And so who has never had to do that sort of rapid hat switching that is asked of someone in a management role where they’re overseeing a diverse range of functions? This is very interesting and it speaks to, I think, some of what you and I’ve been talking about recently about the different kinds of design leaders and how people get to be design leaders. What are the various paths to design leadership that are emerging and what those leaders end up bringing to the role and how the role ends up being shaped to reflect the strengths of those leaders as a result. You had an initial wave of generalists, moving into these leadership roles who were generalists by necessity because there was no way to specialize in digital product design, there was no way to get any kind of formal training in it. So you had to piece it together. You had to adapt. You had to find mentors or people that you could learn from and you had to sort of make your own education, and so they are going to bring a certain sort of a management style as a result of that path, which is going to be a little bit pieced together from a lot of different sources and is going to be a little bit, scrappy and a little bit DIY, let’s see what we can lash together from, what bits of things that we can find to get the job done. Because that was how they got the job done to get where they were. Another sort of pattern of the design leader that you and I have talked about is the design leader who actually doesn’t have any background in design, formal or otherwise, who finds themselves, it’s like, “Hey, congratulations. You’re running the design team now because you seem to be good at something that we, the executive leadership, considered to be vaguely adjacent to design” and people who’ve had to adapt their management skills from other areas, notably, I think from, from technology, and, to some extent from the sort of the marketing and advertising and branding worlds, had to adapt those to this skill set in between. And so how they are going to manage it, it’s going to be different again, because it’s going to be rooted in the doctrine that they came from. And somebody who spent, you know, 25 years in brand marketing before they took over a UX team, they are going to have a whole frame for that work that they’re going to bring to it. And that’s going to influence how decision making happens. And that’s going to influence how they define the roles on their teams and the processes. And all of those kinds of things are all going to be informed by this background culture that the leader has come from. Peter: And then I, I was wondering if there was another path forward. Cause I can think of one other one which is emerging, which, I don’t know enough about the implications of, but it is, you know, now that for the last 15 to 20 years, you do have people who were trained as designers in undergrad, or at least in grad school getting jobs, working as designers, becoming design managers, becoming design leaders. I haven’t read her book. I should, Julie probably will mispronounce her last name. Julie, Julie Zhuo, from Facebook. I believe Facebook was literally her first job out of grad school, as a designer and she was there for quite a while and grew to being a VP of design. She wrote this book,  The Making of a Manager, which is about her experience and her path forward. And in this regard, and now I really want to read the book as I’m thinking about, I wonder, given what you said, how her background steered her in a way that would be different from me as someone who fell into design early in my career, but don’t have a formal design background. And, and I’ve definitely kind of had a bricolage approach to how I’ve managed my career that other archetype, which, I’m assuming this is who you had in mind. Who came to mind for me in terms of the person who leads design without any real design background or having really worked in design, was Scott Zimmer at Capital One, he was the head of design who acquired Adaptive Path, and he led a design team. When he joined to lead it, there were about 40 people. His background was in brand marketing. There are about 40 people in Capital One’s design team, and when he left Capital One, they were about 400. And he had a very, I thought, interesting, approach to leading a design organization that was directly informed by being a brand guy. In particular, I remember him talking about, ‘cause he knew he needed to scale his organization. So one, he was able to sell design internally better than most design leaders because he’s a branding and marketing person. So he knew how to frame design to the other executives in a way that they realized they wanted more of it. But then he realized in order to recruit and hire, he had to be a compelling place to work. And so he was very attuned to how brand influenced people’s decisions on where they worked. Then, acquiring Adaptive Path that had a brand name in the industry. And so, because he knew he could get press basically about how this bank is hiring all these design leaders from these companies you’ve heard of, and that allowed designers to go, “Oh, that’s a place I can work and feel comfortable at, ‘cause I recognize those brands.” So that brand marketing approach was one of the most successful I’ve seen as a design leader, and from a person who has never practiced design, that’s not in his background.  Jesse: There is an interesting sort of continuum that you highlight here between the person who has no formal training in design, but a lot of experience in design, versus the person who really is coming in from a complete outside perspective. And so it feels like there’s this, like, tipping point, beyond which you can’t call yourself an outsider anymore because you’ve been doing design work in some form… Peter: For too long…right, right, right. Jesse: …And so like, somewhere along the way, Scott Zimmer became a design leader by sort of inventing… Peter: …And, and, and inventing a role is that at the time was, exceedingly uncommon. Not being ahead of design, but being a head of design for a 400 person design organization. I mean, you could probably, at the time he left Capital One, there were maybe ten companies that had a design team that large, and one of them happened to be this bank that isn’t even one of the anywhere near the largest banks in America. Jesse: So, you know, we’ve been talking about how people who find themselves in find… Peter: Sometimes it feels like it’s an– Jesse: …accident… Peter:  …accident I, I don’t, I don’t know how intentional I was in becoming a design leader, but yes. Jesse: Hmm. Well, that I, hmm. Peter: I mean, we… Jesse: That is an interesting question… Peter: Right? I mean, when we started Adaptive Path, I mean, we had the kind of experience where when we started Adaptive Path, there were seven of us. We were equal. And then over time, As we grew, okay, I guess we’re the leaders now. And I think that’s true for a lot of folks. Leadership kinda just happens as things happen around you and you have to figure out how to accommodate to that. Jesse: I think that’s true. And actually, you know, that leadership can take a lot of different forms. I think about some of our earliest clients at Adaptive Path when user experience was a very new idea and needed champions, needed advocates, needed people to take an intellectual or a strategic leadership position in the organization, regardless of their position. regardless of the authority that their position held. So you had people who were very close to UX problems by virtue of whatever role they did hold. You know, you’re a webmaster, right? And, nobody asks you to think about this stuff, but it keeps coming up. So you start researching it and you realize there’s something there, and then, congratulations, you’re now running the UX department, when you just happened to be the person who was closest to the problem at the time.   Peter: Right.  Jesse: And I think that to some extent the intent of formal design training is to give somebody that foundation so that they don’t have to piece it all together out there in the wild from, you know, whatever people they can find on the street who will strike up a conversation with them about design leadership. [music break] Peter: Something we were talking about and maybe we can get into now, is this idea of what is the craft of design leadership? Designers talk a lot about craft, possibly more than any other role. I guess engineers might talk about craft. I don’t know if that’s the language that they use to talk about the work they do, but essentially it’s a craft discipline as well. And then as designers become design leaders, there’s this question of, well, what is the craft of design leadership? What is my relationship to craft? Do I let go of my old craft? Is there a new craft to embrace?  Something kind of in parallel that I’m starting to see, is around product management. People talking about “What is the craft of product management?” ‘Cause I think there’s a recognition that there is an opportunity to make clear what that role does. Because so far, that’s a role that has been defined by doing what anyone else is not doing. That is what product managers do. And that’s not any way to, that’s not any way to define a practice or craft.  But, similarly for design leaders, maybe because we’re so wired to think about craft and think about technique and think about process as we become leaders, we kind of fall back on those models and those frameworks of how to work and it’s not clear how, how applicable they are.  I teach a workshop on how to design your design organization and I’ve taught workshops for, I dunno, shit 20 years now. And we taught a lot of them in Adaptive Path. And when we taught workshops at Adaptive Path, they were about craft design. Strategy is a craft, design research as a craft, interaction design is a craft. And you could teach methods and you could teach technique. And when you teach those workshops at the heart of the workshops are activities, right? We were always very activity-based, usually group activities. Sometimes you did them on your own, but they were ways that we could teach methods and you could teach a discrete method. Here’s how you conduct an interview. Here’s how you construct a persona. That’s very teachable. A challenge I’ve had, in teaching my new workshop on designing your design organizations is, it’s not a process, it’s not a method. It’s not really a craft. I’m not teaching them how to draw a better org chart. I’m just, like, using it as a way to get their head in this game. But the bulk of the workshop is a deep conversation. Right now, my hypothesis is that the craft of design leadership is conversation and communication. Jesse: Yeah. Well, I think there is a lot there. You know, if you went to design school, what you were taught was that what they were teaching you, What’s the source of your power? That is, that your, your strength and ability, your capability as a designer was rooted in your mastery of craft. And, for people to get so good at that, that people want to take it away from them as they ascend to a leadership level and to have management basically say, “All of that stuff that you’re so good at, we’re so impressed by, please stop doing all of it,” it can be a really jarring transition and can leave the designer feeling unmoored and adrift and without that source of power that they have, come to rely on, to drive their work and their sense of confidence in their work. I think it’s interesting that you call out conversation and communication, in part because, I feel like we have talked about that as an element of the designer’s craft for a long time from a very pragmatic standpoint that you can’t sell an idea that you can’t explain to people. And the necessity of persuasion and politicking, to some extent in order to get creative ideas realized and get them off of the mood boards and out there in the world.  And I think that’s been a theme for us because it tends to be something that is almost an invisible craft on the part of many of these designers who are good at it, that because their definition of their craft doesn’t include it, they might not even realize how critical that conversation and communication stuff is. Peter: So that skill is actually not specific to management. Definitely not specific to design. Right? Anyone benefits from better communication skills, and I think it’s a matter of figuring out how do you apply these non-design skills to what you do in your new practice as a design leader. Companies don’t pay nearly enough attention and provide nearly enough resources for new leaders, new managers, new leaders in terms of training them up on new skills that they need in order to succeed. ‘Cause as you said earlier, the skills that got you there to whatever this leadership position are no longer the skills that will carry you forward. But, you’re just kind of, most companies put you in a sink or swim mode. when it comes to figuring out how you can excel. It’s one of those fixed mindset versus growth mindset things. I think a lot of folks assume that those non-craft skills, you know, You can either lead or you can’t, and I’m here to tell you that, Nope, you can grow those skills like you grow any other, you just need to recognize that they are growable, that they are not fixed within people, but that we can all learn how to do them better. Jesse: I think that for me, regardless of how much you believe the skills are growable, you have to act as if they are or else they definitely won’t be, right. You have to approach it as if you can develop new abilities because the belief that you can’t is going to guarantee it. Peter: I think, you and I unknowingly, had a benefit in our careers in terms of becoming design leaders, which is that we worked in a consulting capacity for so long and consulting is all about communication and conversation.  There’s things that you develop as a consultant that you might not even realize that you’re developing, but consultants are constantly having to sell their work, sell their ideas every day because of your relationship with your client. There is almost a negotiation happening that is different than when you’re simply in-house. And I think some of the more successful in-house design leaders are those that have that consulting background, because they’ve learned how to communicate with non-designers, right? ‘Cause as a consultant, often your clients were not people who were designers, so you learn how not to get so caught up in your own thing and to speak other people’s languages. And you learn the presentation and storytelling aspects that allow people to be brought along. And so while I’m not going to encourage necessarily everyone to become a consultant, or to spend some time consulting, there’s something about that experience that probably needs to be brought to bear in an internal context where people think, well, I don’t have to do that because I’m internal and these are my coworkers.  But those practices and those habits of communication that you learn as a consultant become immensely valuable.  Jesse: One thing that I’m hearing that’s implicit in what I think both of us are saying about this is that design leadership needs to be approached with the same level of intentionality as a practice as design is in the same way that designers are encouraged to think about how they develop their practice, how they cultivate their practice, how they continue to keep their practice alive, you’re not leaving that behind when you become a design leader. Your practice is a new practice now. And it’s going to involve the integration and synthesis of some new skills and maybe, some reevaluation, and, reassessment of your existing skills to see how those can be applied in these new contexts. So one of those has to do with conversation and communication, some of those skills that we develop, in consulting context. But also I think that it’s about kind of looking at what all of your strengths are as a designer and figure out kind of what is the version of this that exists in this new realm of design leadership? And this, I think, is one of the key functions of the design leader, of anyone in any kind of a leadership role, which is to create shared understanding. And so the designer having this natural strength in creating shared understanding now has the opportunity to take that into this new realm where they’re creating understanding around different ideas, toward different outcomes, but they’re still using that same tool set that they’ve developed. And I think the other thing that comes up, when you are someone who’s done a fair amount of consulting work, is that you’ve had to use these tools in a range of different contexts, which is to say that you’ve had to explain a range of different kinds of problems and a range of different kinds of solutions to a range of different kinds of people. And I think that’s really key because I think it’s really easy for our communication skills to get sort of super-optimized for the people that we communicate with the most or the most regularly, which is how, when a communication style sort of becomes the dominant communication style of an organization, people can get really good at that, and be really successful in that organization. And then as soon as you take them out out of that organization, that skill set doesn’t transfer because they were too good at working within that highly specialized context, to bring it all the way back around to generalization versus specialization, and they haven’t had the opportunity to grow those communication skills in a diverse range of contexts. So for designers who want to become design leaders who want to develop those skills that they will eventually need as design leaders, I think resisting that, that natural tendency to over-specialize our communication style and to cultivate the habit of learning how to communicate in different ways according to different people’s needs, I think is a skill that you can use as a designer. That eventually as you move into design leadership is going to serve you even more. Peter: What does it mean to be a design leader? Different from a business leader, different from, a technology leader, right? There’s going to be shared leadership practices perhaps around communication, but what are the interesting things based on these different people’s different backgrounds that they can bring to that function.  It’s a distinct component of what it means to be an organizational leader, with a design background. You can bring facilitation, you can bring visualization, like what are those things that given your design background, you’re bringing to this organizational leadership conversation that maybe others aren’t.  So I’m now kind of circling back to craft, cause I still think there’s a role that design leaders play in leading design, even if they’re not hands on in the craft anymore, they’re leading a team and a design leader still has a responsibility in that context. You know, things like mentorship, teaching people how to do the craft. I think critique becomes very important in this regard. And through critique you can communicate elements of craft and practice, and help people think about how they refine how they behave Right.  Let’s say you’re a design leader. Let’s say you’re a head of design. How do you make sure that your team is delivering quality work? The quality work that your team is doing is a result of their craft. You’re no longer practicing craft. So how do you bridge that gap? And so there’s a lot of work that a design leader needs to do to establish quality. What does quality look like? What expectations do we have around quality? That’s it’s not a craft, so much for a design leader, so what might be an opportunity for them to still keep a little bit of their craft in play, right? I think for me, I discouraged design leaders from quote, practicing their craft, because it means that they’re no longer leveraged. Leadership is about leverage, and if you’re delivering assets, you’re not being leveraged anymore. But if you’re practicing your craft in a way that is, explicitly about influencing others then, yes, there is an opportunity for you to practice your craft. So anyway, thinking about leadership, it’s thinking about maintaining quality. And then how do you help your teams deliver at that level of quality?  The only model I can think of that is relevant would be the military model that kitchens use. Right, where your most senior chef is someone who has made their way, literally touching every station over the course of their career before they become that most senior chef. Now, as the most senior chef, they are responsible for the quality of everything that goes out the door. But they are not at the fish station. They’re not at the sauce station. They’re not at the grill station, right. People doing that work, but it is up to the executive chef to make sure all those folks are doing it to a level of quality and a level of craft that is appropriate. Now there are problems with applying the restaurant model to the work we do. It’s not practical to expect a design leader in the contexts that you and I operate in to be, an excellent visual designer, and excellent interaction designer, and excellent information architect, and have gone through all those stations with a level of technique such that when we are now the ultimate leader, we can teach anybody how to do any of those things. Whereas that is more achievable in a restaurant context.  Jesse: I find myself wondering how much personal responsibility for mentorship is sensible for a design leader to take on, because, assuming that they got where they are because of not just their abilities, but their taste, right? Their ability to discern a good solution from a bad one. And that’s the part of the craft that they continue to exercise in those critiques and so I guess my question is, to what extent is it appropriate that a design leader try to pass on their taste, their judgment that critical skill in some way. As opposed to simply, here’s how you, you know, get that wicked effect in Photoshop or After Effects or whatever. Peter: Well, the way I get that wicked effect is through Kai’s Power Tools. the most wicked. Speaking of taste and aesthetics, I think it’s still the responsibility of the design leader to articulate why they would make a decision and maybe they are the ones responsible for it. So why they are making a certain decision. “Of these eight solutions, this is the one we’re going with.” And then they explain their reasons, their rationale. But being explicit about it, not just saying we’re going with, we’re moving on, but providing a reason for why we’re going for direction four out of eight, so that others can start understanding that leader’s taste, because that becomes important. But another aspect of this is, How does a leader help their team members develop their own senses of taste? Right? You don’t want to dictate taste. You want folks to develop their own aesthetics and their own understanding of how to navigate these decisions, figuring out how to communicate your taste in a way that breaks it down to these components. I know when I’ve provided critique around designs, I do so by communicating, if something’s not working for me, it’s not just, “It’s not working for me.” It’s, “Oh, that’s not working for me because it feels unbalanced. There’s a weight issue on this screen where this component on the left is overwhelming the components on the right,” or whatever it is. You talk about it in a way that folks can develop a language for their own critical eye. I guess this is part of design as a reflective practice, as we design, to be able to, upon looking at something we like, why do we like it? Being able to unpack that and communicate that, that becomes part of what you are teaching your teams, is that ability to talk about their work, not just a, “I followed these procedural steps. And so my design must be fine because I did the process,” again, ‘cause you could have any number of outcomes of those processes there. There is that last stage of the process where it’s not just, did you follow the steps, but has it come together? Has it jelled? Has it cohered into something compelling, interesting, desirable? And that’s where we need this language to be able to articulate, why something is working, why it isn’t, why you think it’s working. And then that becomes this thing that you can start talking about when it’s not just like, “Because I said so, because it feels right.” But because of these reasons. I think design leaders offer mentorship and critique, at the level that they are at. So if you are a new design leader, if you’ve recently been a practitioner and now you’re a manager, you are offering the craft help that you have just come from. But as you get farther and farther away from that, as you become a manager of managers, what you are mentoring, you’re not mentoring those designers anymore, but you’re mentoring managers on how they can do their new craft better. Jesse: Yeah. I think it’s really true that you and I might have a different point of view on whether a particular design solution is, you know, visually balanced to use your example. But we can’t even have a conversation about that if we don’t have a shared understanding of the concept of visual balance itself. So, In a lot of ways, the question is, does your design process have built into it opportunities to educate designers as to the considerations that go into your critique. Educate your designers as to the considerations that went into your craft that they should be mindful of. And it’s more about enhancing their mindfulness, enhancing their awareness, making sure that they are continuing to ask themselves the right questions as they’re going, so you don’t have to ask them, ideally. So this is a way of kind of commoditizing your own expertise in a way so that you can level up and be focusing your attention on more meaningful things. Peter: I mean, that’s the heart of leverage. Leverage is commoditizing your expertise. Jesse: Mm. Yeah. A lot of good stuff there. [theme music] Peter: Well, once again, we’re wrapping up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, Jesse and I are interested in hearing what you have to say and think about what we’ve discussed today. So, find us on Twitter. Send us an email, and tell us what you think, and if you have ideas on what you would like us to talk about, please share those with us. We are looking forward to hearing from you and reflecting on your thoughts and comments in our future episodes. So thank you for taking your time to listen to us. Jesse: Thanks everybody. Jesse: What’s it called again? What are we doing here? Our podcast is called,  “Help. We’re lost.” Peter: That’s right. We were finding our way and look what good it did. Look what good that did. Jesse: Our podcast is called “Send someone to fetch us. We’re in Saskatchewan.”

In which we learn more of Peter’s recent adventures in design leadership, and we reflect on 20 years of Jesse’s Elements of User Experience. Transcript Peter: Let me do it. Jesse: All right. You got it. [theme music] Peter: Welcome to “Finding Our Way,” the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you on their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. As always, I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi, Jesse. On today’s show, we’re going to follow up a little bit on our first episode. Jesse realized he had some questions for me about some of my work after Adaptive Path that we didn’t get to, that he was wondering about. And then we’re going to be talking about Jesse’s “Elements of User Experience” diagram, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in March. Jesse: Hooray. So at the end of the last episode, you were talking about that word balance and the need for balance between the design perspective and the business perspective, in the work of the design leader, and that they often are called upon to wrangle these creative energies, within a larger organizational context. So I’m curious about when you left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011, what were the problems that you felt like needed solving or that were really interesting or compelling to you, out there in the world as you were figuring out what your next step was after Adaptive Path. Peter: Yeah. So I left Adaptive Path, and I left consulting because I felt that the energy for design and user experience has shifted in house. You were seeing more and more companies building in-house design teams, but also kind of, I had felt a frustration, and I think you’ve shared it, right, working in a consultant capacity where you deliver great work that never sees the light of day. And I realized I want it to be inside the organization that is responsible ultimately for delivering these experiences and to be there when those thousand little decisions are made as something is getting delivered. And it’s those thousand little decisions that slowly but inexorably blunt the quality of the work that is ultimately shipped. And I realized I would be more useful in-house protecting design, protecting the work, protecting the quality. That that would be a better location for me.  Jesse: Right, right. So you had been working as a consultant obviously for many years. You felt sort of stymied in terms of what you could deliver from outside, and do you want to be better positioned to clear a path for success for design, it sounds like. Peter: Yeah, I mean, my–. So I’ve always had a personal mission and that personal mission evolved in bits and pieces, but tends to return to making the world safe for better user experiences. And I realized that in order for me to live out that mission, I needed to go where the decisions were being made that affected those user experiences, `and that just isn’t in a consulting capacity. You can influence them in a consulting capacity. You can try to get the ball rolling, and, and get good positive energy into the process. But really when we’re talking about delivery, it’s, again, all those little decisions that are made along the way, all the compromises you make to satisfy timing requirements, to satisfy engineering limitations, to satisfy regulatory or compliance needs, whatever it is, there’s all these things that, as a consultant, you’re not aware of, you don’t have access to, you’re not around to help think through, typically. And so if I was going to uphold my personal mission of making the world safe for user experience, I needed to go in house and do them. You know, I recognized that I was sacrificing a vision, sacrificing kind of that big, bold ideas, right? ‘Cause when you’re working in-house, you tend to be more incremental. You tend to be more iterative. Whereas in a consulting capacity, you’re usually brought in to think big and bold. And I was going to be sacrificing that top end of my creative potential in the interest of making sure that the things that actually get launched don’t suck. And that was the trade off I was not only willing to make, I was eager to make. Jesse: What constituted the kind of environment that you were able to learn from most effectively? What were you going after, in terms of what was going to drive your growth? Peter: I was headhunted for a role as the VP of global design at Groupon. And Groupon was a company that had actually interested me for a while, even though at the time their media presence was really negative, right? It was when there were all these news stories about how these small local businesses were being overwhelmed by a thousand people showing up with the groupon, on the same day, and they couldn’t deliver on the demand that the Groupon had realized. And so there’s a lot of negative press around Groupon at the time. But, I have a passion for neighborhoods, local businesses, small businesses, that kind of thing. And so when I found out about that opportunity, I was intrigued. I didn’t know what I was stepping into. You never really do until you’re inside. The leadership at Groupon were a lot of people who had been at Amazon and they brought many of those Amazon ways of working to Groupon. So it was a trial by fire on that kind of two-pizza-team approach to product development ’cause that was the Amazon way that they were bringing into Groupon. I got to oversee both product and brand design, and so I was able to take on a more holistic view of design. And then me being me, I was able to kind of treat this as a bit of an experiment. It was a Petri dish that I could try things out with because at the time, there were no kind of standards and practices really. They had grown so fast that there was little rationale behind how the company was organized internally. Where I ended up developing a lot of my thinking around organization design in-house was the work I did at Groupon trying to figure out, How do I structure my teams to deliver coherent, consistent user experiences, in an environment that otherwise wasn’t really set up to do that. And what I ended up doing was bringing a lot of what we had learned at Adaptive Path in terms of What does it take to deliver quality design? And I tried to figure out how can I abstract some of those principles and approaches, and then embed them into this more, quote unquote tech company, Silicon Valley way of working. Jesse: So it’s interesting to think that, the team at Groupon had to be in a certain shape in order for you to even really be able to realize that this set of problems existed for the organization because it’s like if they had brought you in to build a team from scratch, you would have had a sense of what to do and you would have built up something new. On the other end of the spectrum, if they had had a mature design team, a mature design function in place, with a leader, with a well-defined role in place that you could just inherit and drop into, that would have shifted your focus in a different direction. Peter: That’s right. When I joined, I inherited a group of about, at least on the product design side, about 12 men in their mid-20s. And having worked at Adaptive Path and other design contexts where I’d always had a gender equity in design, I had always had a range of ages, it was very bizarre stepping into this. This is October 2012 when I joined. So, end of 2012, beginning of 2013, and that was when I was first made aware of this job title, Product Designer, and that’s how they did it at Facebook, and at Facebook, designers own the design and there’s one designer working with a product manager and some engineers, and that’s the way we should do it, is what I was hearing from some people.  And when I was looking at that, I’m like, that doesn’t make sense to me. One designer can’t do all the things that need to be done well, and I found myself just kind of, pushing back against what was becoming accepted wisdom. And so my challenge and my opportunity as we were growing the design team was, how do we allow designers to  have their emphases right? Not every designer is going to be great at everything. Some designers are going to be stronger at interaction, and some at visual design and some at IA, they can be great at one thing, and pretty good at a bunch of things, but they’re not going to be great at everything. So how do we get designers working together in teams, like we had at Adaptive Path, right? Where you’d have two, three, four designers on a team with complementary skill sets. How do we do something like that internally? Became kind of my mantra, my thinking, my approach. And so my team at Groupon was, was basically built on a series of teams, that we’re meant to have this type of spread of skills in that they were meant to work together and collaborate on the designs that they were delivering. And then the challenge there though is that product development was happening in these two-pizza teams, or think about Spotify-style squads, right? Product development is happening, with a product owner and a group of engineers on a fairly small problem or a feature. And so I didn’t want a designer embedded on those teams. I wanted a group of designers working across these features. If I’m at Groupon, I’m engaged in a shopping experience. That shopping experience is hitting a bunch of these feature teams. I want my design to make sure that that experience is coherent. And that was the fundamental difference between how I’m working at Groupon, and how, say, things worked at Facebook, right? At Facebook, there was no expectation of coherence across products, ’cause if you dipped into the newsfeed and then you dipped into messenger and then you dipped into photos, that wasn’t a flow, right? It was this portfolio of apps. At Groupon, there’s a flow, there’s a journey that you’re on and I need to make sure that journey is coherent. And so that was my operating principle. And what led me to shape the teams at Groupon the way I did, which was not typical, right? I had to kind of invent it,  drawing from my experience with Adaptive Path and how design teams work, and then figuring out how can I hook that into how a contemporary product development organization operates. Jesse: I think it must have been a real challenge for you to, confront Silicon Valley orthodoxy in that way, especially when you’re up against the culture that is, I don’t want to say eager, but definitely ready to marginalize design, and definitely feels the gravitational pull of giving all of the power back to the engineers. And so I guess I’m imagining a lot of ideological evangelism on your part, with your peers, just to create space for them to go from, you know, from the zero designers per team to something like four designers per team. Peter: Right. Right. I was fortunate that most of my interactions and relationships were with product leaders and they were just grateful that a grownup had come in who had a vision for how this could work and could see it through. And so, understanding their concerns, making sure they knew they could reach out to me directly and immediately to address those concerns if something did come up, but just saying, “Hey, this is how we’re going to do it. Trust me. Let’s try it out.” The primary pushback I got, at least initially, was from my team. Right, I mentioned I had all these kind of cowboys in their mid-20s and they loved this maverick product designer role and, and mindset that they’re the designer and that they wield this special magical power within their squads when it comes to design. And I was moving away from that. I’m like, no, you’re not going to be the person, the owner, you’re going to be part of a team that’s working together. And some of my designers really reacted negatively to that. They liked working alone. They liked being the point person for design. And what ended up happening is those folks left, and that’s pretty typical. I’ve seen over and over again when a new leader comes in, some percentage of the existing team will leave, and that makes sense. The new leader has a different way of working, and then the people who are there are going to realize, like, “Oh, that’s not how I want to work. I came because of how it was before.” And that’s changing. And especially in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of fluidity and mobility when it comes to work. And so people who don’t want something, they, they move on. But I was, I was easily able to, replace them, and beyond, with folks who did understand this way of working. Since leaving Adaptive Path, my year and a half with Groupon was probably the most informative and the greatest learning opportunity I had as a design executive.  Jesse: When you were at AP, I feel like your focus was really on developing a robust design practice, and that was the orientation, it sounds like, you took forward into these executive leadership roles, and then through those experiences, that evolved into a more of an organizational orientation. Peter: So while I was at AP, I was more involved with practice, but, you’ll recall, a lot of work done trying to figure out the architecture of AP project teams, creative lead, program lead, what their distinct roles and responsibilities were, what it meant to be a practitioner on those teams, as you and I became executive sponsors, what our relationship to those teams was, and I kind of had led that because as we grew AP, we had more and more people who wanted to be. creative leads, and we hadn’t defined the role well, the role, up for the longest time, the role was, well, however, a founder does it, as more and more people were doing it, we needed to be very explicit about what that role entailed. And so, I had done a bunch of org design at AP. When I went in house at a place like Groupon, I was still aware of process. And one of the ways I was able to make that realized was through whom I hired, right? I made sure to hire people who had a user centered design background. All the folks who I’d inherited were these product designers who had kind of taught themselves on the job, but had been very much, for lack of a better word, and this is going to sound dismissive, kind of these Dribbble designers, right? They were really good at polished shots, but they weren’t really good at thinking about  structures and systems of interactive media. And so, there was almost no user centricity. There was a small user research team, but they had largely been doing heuristic evaluations. And so from a methodology standpoint, when I came on, I made sure to bring on people who understood human-centered practices and processes, and I kind of let them do what they needed to do in their context. As a VP, your job is organizational, especially as you’re trying to recruit and hire and scale and grow. And that was when I realized there weren’t any resources for a design leader, scaling a team. You looked out on the web, you looked out in the world, and there was nothing for me to provide me a guide for how to do this. And that was when I realized there was something here to continue to pursue. So, so while I was mindful of practice and yes, at AP I had been very, very practice and process and methodology-oriented, I also had that understanding of organization. And then in my role as the design executive, I delegated the practice leadership to the people I hired and focused on the organizational design in my role. Jesse: I think that, sometimes it’s a question of scale. Sometimes it’s a question of the level of maturity of the organization and sometimes it’s a question of the culture of leadership of an organization in terms of how close the design leader stays to the design work over time. Awesome. Thank you so much.   [theme music] Peter: March 2020 is an interesting time, a special time, because it is the 20th anniversary of your diagram of “The Elements of User Experience.” If you go to, I believe, let me see if I can do the URL off the top of my head, http://jjg.net/ia/elements.pdf, you can see, “The Elements of User Experience” PDF, and it will say on it that it was published the 30th of March, 2000. And so, we wanted to, as we’re kicking off this podcast, we wanted to recognize this milestone. It was actually, that diagram was core to how you and I went beyond just knowing one another as bloggers and started to become professional colleagues and on the path to working together. How did the Elements emerge and what were you hoping to accomplish with it? Jesse: Well, you know, it’s interesting to reflect on because the state of web design at that time, at the turn of the century was such that there was a great deal of attention paid to aesthetics and to technology, but the practices that eventually would become known as user experience, we’re just sort of starting to bubble up around the edges. And, this was just starting to become sort of a legitimate job. At this point in my career, I had been doing content work on the web, writing, editing, managing editorial teams, and had started to see where content and design issues intersect and had transitioned into what was at the time called an information architecture role. And so I was the first information architect hired into a traditional, to the extent that there were traditions in web design consulting at that time, a traditional web design consultancy, which was very, very much modeled on a graphic design consultancy. It was very much how they structured the work that they did. And so I had to explain to a lot of people who had a more sort of traditional design background, what kind of work I did and how it fit into the larger picture of what we were delivering to organizations. And I found myself having to have this conversation over and over again, really just to sort of justify my existence at the table, and found myself in need of a visual aid to help myself understand the relationship between these ideas and to help communicate that relationship, and the elements model emerged out of that over the course of a few months of sort of noodling on it in late 99 and early 2000. Peter: So your initial desire, what you were hoping to accomplish was simply to help your colleagues understand what it was you do. Jesse: Well, yeah. And hopefully to help the organization be able to communicate to clients my value so that we had a clear shared understanding of what we were trying to accomplish and how we all participated. Peter: You release it, it catches on within a web design and user experience community, it gives you an opportunity to write a book that you’ve written a couple of editions for, based on the diagram, where you can flesh out the thinking behind it in greater detail. It’s now 2020, and people still use it. It is still, you still see it, it’s used in courses, I’m wondering what has most surprised you about the longevity of that diagram? If anything? Maybe you’re like, Nope, I expected this to have a 20 year life span… Jesse: Oh no. I mean, I–But… Peter: If you didn’t, what, what, if anything, surprises you about its continued relevance? Jesse: You know, one reason that I put a date on it so prominently on the original diagram was that I expected it to change. And, I expected to want to, iterate and evolve it. But I got it out there and, you know, so what happened was, I had been using it internally, and then I sent it to you, and you were like, “Hey, this looks pretty cool. Can I share it with some friends?” And I’m like, “Sure.” And then the next week we went to the first IA Summit. And somehow everybody there had already seen it. So it had kind of already taken on a life of its own before I even really got a chance to think about like, how I might want to, you know, change it. And then once it was out, I really felt like I shouldn’t mess with it too much. What has been surprising to me, is that, with very few changes, somehow it continues to speak to how people see and understand this work, all these years later, even though the work itself is dramatically different. Peter: How does it remain relevant? So this comes out, it’s a web world. It’s still a, I think largely, CRT world, we’re not that far removed from 8-bit Netscape, color cube, dial-up web, right? And it’s not a broadband world yet by any stretch. And now we’ve got mobile, we’ve got emerging platforms, everyone has a high speed connection in their pocket. Yet somehow it remains relevant. And I’m wondering what you attribute that to, and if you’ve ever considered updating it, given all these kind of technological evolutions. Jesse: I haven’t felt a need to update it. I think, in part, it’s not in my nature to want to spend a lot of time dwelling on things that I’ve done already. My inclination would be to make something new rather than going back and trying to continue to sort of stretch and extend the old thing to fit whatever has changed. Okay. So my philosophy has always been that, Elements has a life of its own, and that life is going to have its own cycle that I can’t really do anything about. And, it’s up to other people as to whether or not Elements, you know, stays alive, as long as they continue to find it useful.  Peter: Right. What impact did you hope to have, developing this, this model, this diagram, this framework for thinking about user experience? Jesse: I wish I could say it was that strategic. I think you have to separate the diagram from the book in some ways in that they are slightly different tools. That are created to meet slightly different needs. The diagram is really something that you would sit down with somebody and use as a tool. Whereas the book exists more to, sort of empower and enlighten the designer.  And so in terms of big picture impact, it’s trying to empower as many designers as possible. But again, the thing got away from me so quickly that I don’t feel like I am really the one driving the boat here. Peter: So there was this need in the late 90s / early 2000s as more and more people are recognizing they need this type of work done. There’s folks who are like, “You don’t really understand what you’re getting into. Let me, let me make sure you understand kind of the breadth and depth of the situation here.” All right. And just simply providing that kind of map of the territory. You thought you were just living on the city block, but it turns out there’s this whole neighborhood around you that affects what you’re doing and you need to be familiar with. Jesse: You know, I think Elements was very much a product of its time for something that has turned out to be as enduring as it has. I think that it would be very difficult for something like this now to have the kind of impact that this had, at that time, there is just so much stuff now. It’s really, it’s kind of hard to imagine a diagram taking the field by storm at this point, which makes it even stranger to reflect that, that ever happened at all.  I have these experiences all the time with strangers, because of the book. I was in a parking lot here in Oakland about, mm, three, four weeks ago, loading groceries into the back of my car, and a woman, black woman probably in her mid-thirties approached me in the parking lot, and she had her like six-year-old little girl with her. And she walked up to me and she asked if I was me and I told her that I was, and she thanked me for the book and thank me for the impact that the book had on her as she was trying to find her place in the world. And something in the book spoke to her and gave her a direction. And, now she’s leading a design team, and having that experience over and over again has been an extraordinary gift. Yeah. To see the impact that it’s made on individual people in their lives as they’re finding a sense of direction and a sense of purpose through the way that I have articulated this set of problems in this set of ways of thinking about it. That’s been far and away the best part of all of it. Peter: I realized that I’ve been emphasizing using the diagram because that’s what I have a relationship with much more than the book,how evergreen has the book proven to be, and is that something that 10 years after the second edition, do you get a sense that people are still buying it? The people are still finding it relevant? Tell me a little bit about that journey with the book. Jesse:  The book is doing great. It sells a very consistent, sort of steady, number of copies every year. Entirely accidentally, it turns out that the framework of elements is a great introductory text for a UX program. So, many people find themselves reading this book in school, as they are first exploring this career path, which is how it’s been able to have that kind of impact. And then they keep it, and they take it with them and they refer back to it and they bring it to their jobs and they recommend it to their coworkers and all of this stuff. So, I can’t really speculate as to the breadth of impact of either the book or the diagram, but I will say that I feel like the book has probably had a deeper impact on people. Peter: What has been the most common legitimate criticism that you’ve received? Either of the diagram or the book that you would like to address now. Jesse: Well, you know, it, it always smarts for me when the content people look at the diagram and say, what about content? Because I’m a content guy, you know, as I said, my roots are in content, and there are many, many considerations involved in content strategy that I would not attempt to put into this diagram.  And I think they do have a legitimate complaint in that it’s not comprehensive. Peter: But, it looks,  as I’m looking at the diagram right now, there’s something almost Kubrickian about it, right? It’s symmetric. It’s evenly weighted.It feels so whole and internally consistent that it doesn’t really invite, like, “How do I engage with it?” I just receive it. Jesse: Yeah. Well, that’s true. I mean, there have been many people who have done, you know, rifts or elaborations or extensions, of the model. There are people who have, like, seven layer versions and nine layer versions and stuff…  Peter: No kidding. Jesse: Yeah, yeah. I, I don’t, I, you know, there’s, I, I have seen so much of that stuff flow by over the years, so many student projects. So many conference poster sessions many of them really smart and interesting and thoughtful, some of them a little sort of, overenthusiastic perhaps. Peter: I mentioned Kubrickian right. And now thinking about the monolith, right. It feels like just this perfect jewel that you can look at it, but don’t touch. Jesse: Yeah. Well, you know, honestly, it feels a little bit like that to me too. I mean, it does sometimes feel like Elements is kind of a thing that happened to me.  And having made this sort of perfect, hermetically sealed little structure. I don’t know that I can crack it open any easier than anybody else could, you know?  Peter: That’s fair. That’s fair. You know, I remember talking to you probably pretty early on when we were working together, and I remember you saying like, “This is just how I see things,” which is not how I work. I’m a very verbal person. I tend to process initially through writing and if I diagram, it’s not a highly visual diagram. It’s at best, maybe a two by two here or there. But I got the sense that your initial mode of analysis as you look at the world around you, there was just a kind of visual information processing that was going on there. Do you still find that, that, visualizing mode that you’ve have had, does that still come to bear? Do you still see these things in pictures? I guess that’s another way of saying, are we to expect to any thing like that anytime soon? Are you working on any models? Jesse: “When are you going to make another one?” Peter: Yeah. Not that specifically, but, ‘cause I’m guessing you’re trying to make sense of the world around you and the way you do that is through these visualizations. How is that going right now, if at all? Jesse: Yeah, I mean, I do tend to use a lot of diagrams in my work. Sometimes they are more useful to me than they are to the people around me.  I Understand the relationships between ideas geometrically. When I am working through a problem, I am often working with abstractions that had been made concrete, in a visual way in some way, and I, this is not uncommon, I mean, this is a way of working that’s familiar, I think, to a lot of people who do design work. And so it’s always naturally going to be a part of what I do. I do think that the spirit of Elements, which is, tools for conversation, tools for creating shared understanding, tools for creating a common language. I mean, we hadn’t really talked about the way in which this work at the time didn’t have an overarching label. Before Elements. A lot of these various terms were used in muddy ways. You may remember the three conflicting definitions of information design that were floating around circa 1999. At least three. There was a lot of muddiness in terms of the terminology… Peter: Well, I’m glad all that terminology stuff has been cleared up now. Jesse: [Laughing]  It gave us a place to move forward from. And I think that is a theme that continues for me is trying to find ways to crystallize and instantiate, our current understanding of things to give us something to push off of and something to move forward with as we continue finding our way. Peter: Is that your sign that you need to sign off? Jesse: Well we have about 90 seconds. Peter: Well this is great. I actually learned some stuff I didn’t know about the diagram inandyour process and experience resonates a lot with me. I think if there is a lesson to be learned and it’s one that you, and I, I think,  have preached for years, is, share, just share with the world the things that are rattling around in your head that you might think are really only relevant to you. And many of them will only be relevant to you, but occasionally something will, get out there and really catalyze and crystallize with a broad swath of people, and honestly help move things forward.  Jesse: It’s how we move forward together. Peter: Yeah, exactly, as we find our way together. So on that note, that’ll wrap up this episode of Finding Our Way. As before, we are eager to hear from you. We are easy to find. I’m @peterme on Twitter. Jesse’s @jjg on Twitter. You can go to the website. We will have an email address there. We would love to hear from you. We would love to hear what you are thinking about what we’re sharing, other stuff that you would like us to share,  especially here at the outset of what we’re doing, as we’re finding our way to finding our way. So, with that, thank you Jesse, and, goodbye. Peter: A minor, slow motion, anxiety attack. That pretty much lasted through the evening a little bit into my sleep. So I’m great. How are you? Jesse: Oh, I, I, you know, I don’t have your emotional investment in the NBA, but, I had a similar experience last night, of,  yeah, just sort of this mounting helplessness, that, I decided to burn off by going to Safeway and, finding out what kinds of things, they might have that I might want to have around. So I got myself some toilet paper and some paper towels and some acetaminophen, and I came home feeling better.