Finding Our Way

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.

In which we learn a little of Peter and Jesse, their past history together, and their more recent history apart. Keywords: Exploring in public, leading design agencies, leading design teams, organizational design, leadership coaching, Adaptive Path, meaning, purpose, creativity, resilience. TranscripT Peter: I’m like, wait, a moment what do we call it? Jesse: We gotta have something to, we’ve gotta choose some theme music. We’ve got a lot still unanswered here for sure, but we can just make the first episode about: “What should we call this thing?” Tape is rolling by the way. So literally anything that you say right now can just go into the podcast. Peter: And so I… just kind of free associating, critic, critique, studio, charette, alignment, white space, negative space, wayfinding. And I was like, wayfinding. Wayfinding. I liked that one. Jesse: I feel like I thought of that and looked and I found another podcast called that or something. I don’t know. Maybe. Peter: I couldn’t find one called that. Jesse: I don’t know why I dismissed it then. Peter: I couldn’t find one called that. And I don’t know if it, if that in and of itself is the right title, because it sounds like, okay, we’re your, you know, environmental design podcast, or interior architecture podcast. But if you flop wayfinding to “finding our way,” that I felt speaks to a sense of a journey that you and I are on, grappling with these ideas, as we try to figure out, we grapple with, a sense that the existing conversation, that old models, prior models, whatever, are not quite right, but we don’t know what is. Jesse: I–I–I I love this name. I think you’ve nailed it. I love the multiple meanings of it. I love how it’s like each of us individually finding our way, plus the two of us together finding our way, plus us as a community finding our way, figuring out how our way is different from the old way or old ways. And it also communicates some of that sort of no agenda-ness that I liked about some of our earlier ideas. Peter: Right. We– we recognize we don’t have the answers. That was the challenge with the– Jesse: It still evokes that same, that same adaptivity and improvisational quality that the original Adaptive Path name had. So it’s got resonance on a bunch of levels. I really, I dig it. Let’s do it. [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’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Good day. So, this is our first episode of a new podcast. We probably need to explain what we’re about. Jesse: Yes, we do. Peter: What do you see this podcast about, Jesse? Jesse: So to my mind, design and design leadership finds itself at a really interesting crossroads at this point in its evolution, as the challenges that we’re facing are getting more complex. You and I are part of a generation of designers who are in leadership roles now who did not necessarily come up through traditional design education, who, you know, came up through the school of hard knocks and are finding ourselves facing new challenges as our influence is growing, and as the strategic value of our work is becoming more and more apparent. And so “Finding Our Way” is about, in part, about how all of us collectively are finding our way through this present moment as design practices are continuing to evolve as the value of design in business is continuing to be recognized, and as the potential for us to do real harm in the world is continually being recognized more and more. And I think that those kinds of things, and how our practices and how “how we do our jobs” needs to continue to evolve to meet those challenges, I feel like is a big part of what we’re about here. Peter: That’s right. I think we’re in a moment, somewhat liminal, with how organizations are embracing design, and doing so with more alacrity than they ever have. And, I think you and I have a sense that these organizations, as they’re embracing design, don’t really know what it is they are embracing, don’t really understand the implications of what it is that they are bringing on, and I think the people who are leading the charge, specifically the design leaders, don’t quite understand their own leadership potential, don’t understand how to be the most effective leaders they can be, because that isn’t often their background, their orientation, right, they came up through craft and practice, and now they’re expected to lead. And so you have this… collision of organizations embracing design, not quite understanding the implication of that, and design leaders leading this charge who don’t really understand the nature of their influence and opportunity within these organizations. And it’s created a bit of a, of a muddle to be honest, which has in turn led to a whole host of support structures that have emerged very organically: Conferences like Adaptive Path’s old Managing Experience and Leading Experience conference, the Leading Design conference that Clearleft puts on. I was just at a design leadership summit in Toronto. Like, every region is now launching their own design leadership event. Active community Slacks, et cetera, as there’s this community of people, this group of people who are trying to figure out what does it mean to be a good design leader right now because it’s not clear. Whereas in other functions leadership, I think, it’s probably way clearer, in this one, it definitely isn’t. Jesse: Yeah. And I would say that it’s not at all homogenous in terms of what a design leader looks like from organization to organization. I don’t know if it’s settled out into a few broad archetypes yet, But there’s definitely a wide array of different ways of doing this job, and different organizations ask different things of design leaders. And I think, that we are just starting to, as a community, engage in the task of sort of synthesizing all of these different perspectives and all of these individual experiences into a more holistic sense of what the role actually is, what the role actually entails, and what leadership looks like even among those people who might not be formally tasked with it, which is something that I think is going to continue to be an influential factor over the development of the entire field. So, yeah, I love that. I love that you and I are finding our way and design and design leaders are finding our way together, and that spirit of exploration, and discovery, I think is what this podcast is all about. But why should anybody care about what you and I think about these topics? Peter: We have, for over 20 years, found our way in public. You and I started, with five others, Adaptive Path in 2001, and really gave ourselves an opportunity to not just do design work, but think hard about the context in which design work takes place, in an effort to, in our own selfish interest, of having that design work be realized and have an impact, and so we’ve spent a lot of time in the intervening 20 years thinking about how do we allow, how do we enable design to realize its potential, in a world that often feels like it’s hostile to the work of design and designers? Jesse: You mentioned, this exploring in public thing, which has been a characteristic of both of our careers and of our work together. And that did start, back, in the context in which we first met, which was not a professional context at all, but we met as hobbyists on the internet maintaining personal websites, who happened to be on similar trajectories until we finally found our trajectories intersecting a couple of years later. The practice of blogging at that time, which was very much something that, where everybody was sort of lashing together, their own technology, and it was all very, very primitive. And, there was a great deal of, of experimentation with what new forms were possible, in this new medium of the web, that maybe weren’t possible before. And, that exploration was what led to the evolution of blogging. And then eventually, pretty much all of social media comes out of that. I think that it was that same sort of curious hobbyist mindset that then informed the work that we did together when we started Adaptive Path in 2001. That it was as much an experiment as any of our tinkering with web publishing in the 90s was, in that it was a vehicle for figuring out what was possible. Peter: Right. I mean, we were very explicit as we were forming Adaptive Path that we didn’t want to be the kind of consulting company that we had worked for prior. And that we saw as an explicit objective of Adaptive Path was, I believe the phrase was, “advance the field of user experience.” And we saw the mechanism by which we would do that to be around writing and speaking and publishing, not just through the work, because doing the work, yes, we could benefit our clients, but we couldn’t benefit the community. And the thing that brought the seven of us together was a desire to have a platform for tackling these issues at the level of community, and again, kind of connecting with what we’re continuing to do with this podcast here, be very exploratory, be experimental, put ideas out there, get feedback, refine our own thinking based on that public feedback. Neither of us come at this as trained designers, we both have other backgrounds. My background is in anthropology, yours is in journalism, right? That we recognized that our approach to problem solving was aligned with the work of design, particularly kind of a software design and web design. But, we don’t necessarily identify as quote unquote designers has given us this perspective around design. Jesse: Let’s do the career recap real quick, because I do want to provide some bonafides and reassure folks that we are not just writers and speakers, but we’ve also been, you know, active working designers and design leaders for all these years as well. So, we met through our mutual interest in blogging the late nineties. Through that, we discovered that we were interested in some similar things, from a career perspective. After that, we co-founded the company Adaptive Path in 2001 with a whole bunch of–a whole bunch, well it seemed like a whole bunch–seven co-founders, we started the first what I call the first user experience consultancy. Obviously, there were other consultancies that were doing UX or UX-adjacent work before that, but we really sort of staked a claim to user experience as the umbrella term for the work that we were doing as opposed to web design or interaction design or software design or… Peter: Or usability… Jesse: Usability was, yeah, that definitely, usability was a dominant factor in the market at that time. We felt user experience really expressed what we were trying to do, and we adopted that label for our work. We were doing that work as an agency on a client basis, as well as, as Peter mentioned, we ran conferences and workshops for, for user experience designers for many years. Our flagship conference UX Week ran for 16 years. And we did a bunch of other related stuff as well. Peter is the coauthor of the books Subject to Change and Org Design for Design Orgs. I wrote a book called The Elements of User Experience. Along the way, these are some of the tools that we’ve tried to put out there to… The way that I think of it is I’m always trying to help other people have better conversations about the work that they’re doing through this stuff. But you know, I think what might be interesting to people is that we worked together for a long time, and then we have not worked together for a long time. It has been nearly a decade since you and I have worked together or have, really had, more than the occasional in-depth conversation about design. And so I think this is going to be interesting for us to discover how our viewpoints have evolved in the intervening years. Peter: I’m currently doing some work with Wells Fargo, and the first project that you and I ever worked on together was for Wells Fargo. 2002-2003. Exactly. And so, I did consulting work for Wells Fargo, PeopleSoft, Ameriprise, SKT, Samsung, I know you did a bunch of work in journalism, CNN, I remember, comes to mind. Jesse: CNN, Disney, Skype, Microsoft. yeah. Peter: Right. And then 2011, I left Adaptive Path to go in house. I was kinda done with consulting. I wanted to be where I felt the action was and where the heat had moved and it had moved, I believe, from kind of the design consulting realm into the in house world, companies were starting to recruit and hire and build internal design teams. And my journey, there has been a lot of companies in nine or so years, probably most notably Groupon, where I ran design. Jawbone, where I helped run design. And then most recently, my last full time job was at a company called Snagajob, where I was the VP of design. And then I had projects and clients. I worked with OpenTable and, and other companies along that way. Capital One, actually, after the Adaptive Path acquisition. And so my career has been largely one of being a design executive, being the senior most design person in an organization needing to establish, grow, and kind of up-level design and design practice within these organizations. Make it a healthier function than usually what I found when I joined. And that’s what directly inspired the book that I co-wrote with Kristin Skinner, Org Design for Design Orgs and, and kind of the current mission I’m on as I’ve gone back to being an independent consultant, I work on my own, but, where I’m now trying to help design leaders do right by the design organizations they are building. So that’s kind of been my trajectory. When I left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011, what did you end up, you stayed there, you were there in 2012, through the acquisition by capital one in 2014 and then for five years at Capital One, yeah, since that acquisition. So what has your journey been like? Jesse: Well, you know, as, as you mentioned around that time that you left Adaptive Path, the market was really shifting for user experience consultancies, as internal teams were getting more robust, they were getting more mature. They were just needing us less, or they were needing us for different things that we were not necessarily optimized for. And so the business was, was solid and was stable, but was also not really growing. And we kind of felt like Adaptive Path had reached a certain level of maturity, and that was right around the time that Capital One came around in 2014, to see if we were interested in an acquisition that would help them jumpstart the development of some mature design practices and a mature design culture for them as an organization. We were, we were somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 people. I think at the time, they already had about, I want to say, about 120 people. So we were, we were not in any way, you know, the majority of the Capital One design talent, but we were a huge injection of team and culture to that organization. And when the acquisition happened, I kind of took the attitude that no matter how this went, it was going to be interesting to watch. It was going to be interesting to see, you know, how these two cultures came together and to see the nuts and bolts of how you build, an enterprise design team at scale, from, from some core ideas about how to do the work effectively. And then, over the course of that five year period, I watched the Adaptive Path team go through various evolutions as it moved toward becoming a fully integrated part of the Capital One design organization. And I got to sort of help nudge things along in terms of establishing cultural practices that I hope were going to be, uh, really a part of how that organization does design for a long time to come. And that process of integration had kind of run its course around the middle of 2019, as everything sort of wound up. And I realized that I had, I’d seen the movie that I’d come for at Capital One, and I’m really happy to report that the acquisition and the transition I think went very well across the board. And now in the course of that journey, I have found myself really interested in the way that the dynamics among the individuals on design teams influences the quality of the outcomes, the way in which how we work together, how we collaborate, how we interact, from day to day and moment to moment, determines whether this is a team that can deliver consistent results, iteration over iteration. It determines whether or not this is a team that can deliver new thinking. It determines whether this is a team that can survive, you know, a technical setback, those kinds of things. And so, within Capital One, I started moving into an inhouse leadership coach role where I was supporting design leaders, helping them untangle those problems of the interpersonal dynamics of teams, to help them figure out how to make those teams more resilient and more successful. Peter: Were you working primarily with leaders or were you working with whole teams? Was it primarily at that leadership layer? What were you observing that allowed you to help those leaders maybe be better understand their role? Jesse: Yeah. I was working with team leads. A lot of it was, really sort of being like ship’s counselor, being the person that you can come and sit down and say, “Hey, I just had a difficult conversation with somebody,” or “I’m about to have a difficult conversation with somebody, and I just need to kinda hash it all out and have somebody to do that with.” Peter: So, so you’re a Betazed then? Jesse: Hopefully. Yeah. That’s the, that’s the aspiration. Peter: In terms of your work supporting leaders, was this something that you kind of fell into? Was this something that you identified as where you wanted to be? How did you arrive there as opposed to, like, when we last worked together, your focus was on creative leadership for design, right? You were the Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path. You are helping set creative agenda for the company. You are leading projects for clients like Disney, doing creative work. So what was your journey from creative leadership to this organizational therapy, and how intentional was it versus if you just kind of ended up there? Yeah. Jesse: Yeah, I would say there are two parts of that. One part of it is Capital One’s organizational journey. As they were maturing as an organization, they were minting a lot of fresh design leaders and those leaders didn’t have mentors, didn’t have development support, didn’t really have anything because, you know, it was all new. And so, Somebody would say, “Hey, you know, maybe you should talk to Jesse about that kind of thing.” And then I would have these little side counseling conversations with people that then eventually got to a place where the executive leadership at Capital One looked at what I was doing and said, “Hey, why don’t we just make that your job?” And that was my job for the last two years that I was there. Peter: I’m still trying to better understand your passion for this subject. Jesse: Oh, well, so, that’s the one half of it, which is the organizational half of it. The second half of it is my personal journey, which is the occasion of the acquisition. And my transition from having been in an executive leadership role in a company that I founded for 13 years to being one of a large number of leaders with voices that had to be balanced in the mix of setting strategy for Capital One. And, realizing that I, I didn’t really understand how to work effectively in that dynamic. I knew how to work effectively in the dynamic that we’d created at AP. I realized that effective leadership in this context where you’ve got a multiplicity of peers, and a diverse and complex set of agendas to navigate required much more sophisticated relationship management skills then I had developed as a leader, and so it was my digging into what would improve my effectiveness as a leader. That led to me starting to share some of that perspective with the people around me. Peter: Interesting. What is the influence or impact you hope to have through your work? I mean, it could be as grand as the Steve Jobs “What is the dent in the universe you want to make?” or something, you know, perhaps more quotidian and practical. Jesse: How big do you want to go? I mean, my sense is that when creative people are connected to their personal sense of purpose and feel a sense of connection to the people that they work with on a day-to-day basis, they produce their best work and the best work of our most creative people can change the world. And so my point of view is that if I can help a leader create an environment in which the people around them feel connected to their own sense of purpose in the world and that they feel that they are working with a leader who is connected to their own sense of purpose in the world, and that connection is authentic and mutually supportive, that is a team that is going to be resilient to any number of reorgs, or shifts in product strategy. That is a team that is going to be able to take more chances creatively, that is a team that is going to be able to advocate for itself more effectively. The strength and resilience of the team, I think, ultimately, is the biggest determining factor of the long-term quality of the outcomes. And that ultimately comes down to the tone and the practices that the leader puts forward. Peter: Yeah. So I think where we strongly overlap is a recognition of an untapped opportunity for organizations to draw value from the work of creative people, right? Organizations are really bad at that. They’re really good at squashing creativity. Almost kind of famously so. And really poor at enabling creativity. And I think that’s this common ground that you and I share that’s our probably our single highest degree of overlap. I’m sensing your emphasis is on the individuals, their abilities, capabilities, relationships… Really empowering, really kind of going deep down into the human, to the humans that make up these creative organizations and helping them realize their potential. My orientation has been more structural, systematic, and organizational. How do I get these groups of people operating with one another and with the other functions in an organization to enable that creativity to flourish. And so I think I hadn’t known that before. And I suspect that those distinct orientations will guide how we tackle this subject moving forward. Jesse: Yeah, I think it’s true. And I think that you have to have both things, right? I mean, you know, I often draw on examples from the arts, but if you think about, let’s say a musical performance, you’ve got to have somebody who has figured out the set list, and you have to have somebody who has figured out the lighting, and somebody to run the sound board, and somebody to put all of the things in place that support the musician in that moment of performance and make all those structures fit to support that moment. Peter: That’s called MusicOps. Jesse: [Laughing] Exactly. None of that has anything to do with the musician as a musician, right? It’s all the things that make the musicians successful at being a musician, but it also has nothing to do with the core sort of activity, which is the moment to moment performance, and it’s that moment to moment performance that I think is the other side of it that has to go along with the organizational structures that support creating that creative environment. It’s an imperfect metaphor. Peter: No, it’s, well, something I’m coming back to when you talk about creativity, creativity by its nature is uncertain, is unpredictable. When enabled leads to the highest heights. But the practice of which is paralyzing and intimidating for most organizational leaders who want to better understand what they can get and when they can get it, which runs contrary to creativity and I suspect a theme that will be recurring throughout our conversations moving forward. Is this tension between, certainty, and the certainty that organizations require, feel they require in order to do their work and, and the creative condition. I mean, almost as I’m saying, and I’m almost getting to this point where it’s like, is this even possible? Or, or, is there a necessary blunting of creativity? Maybe creativity can still have an impact, but will it always be, to some degree, contained, below it’s potential? Within these organizational contexts that we are talking about, right? It’s one thing if you’re a band, it’s, uh,one thing if you’re a theater production, I mean, there’s constraints in all these types of things, but those areas where the purpose is the creative expression, right? That’s distinct from what we’re talking about, which is trying to bring some of that energy that you see in those areas and figure out how do you shape it and activate it within these organizational contexts that aren’t really geared towards that type of output. Jesse: Right. Right, right. Yeah. I think it is paradoxical and I think that the role of the design leader is to hold that paradox and continue to walk that line and always to be in that place of not allowing the creative concerns to override the business concerns and have, you know, the designers go become rogue divas who are in so in love with their own creative vision that they don’t understand or appreciate or take into consideration the practical constraints that influence whether or not the design can actually be delivered. You don’t want that. And then on the other hand, you don’t want the business factors driving things too much either. So, I think that it is a balance that needs to be held on an ongoing basis rather than a problem to be solved one and done. Peter: I like the word balance there. One of the few business books that I think speaks to our industry well is called Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar. And he uses the concept of balance as opposed to stability. He sees stability as brittle, and that what you don’t want is stability, you want balance, where there’s an ongoing management of equilibrium and the pendulum is always going to swing. You can’t stop the swinging. And in fact, you don’t want to stop the swinging. The swinging is fine. You want to manage the swinging, but finding, striking that balance as you move forward becomes the challenge of the leader. Maybe that’s not to cut us off here, but it feels like that’s a good capstone for, as we discussed, the mission of what we’re about here is this ongoing conversation around that type of balance as you’re on these journeys as we are finding our way forward, always kind of bobbing and weaving, trying t, stay true to our objectives. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Continuing to walk that tightrope. Well, thank you, Peter. This has been great. Peter: This has been. Jesse: What do we say at the end of our show? Peter: [Sighs] Jesse: Isn’t this where we came in? Peter: So I think at the end of this, this first episode, you know, you and I have never hosted our own podcasts. I’ve been a guest on many podcasts. I’m assuming you’ve been a guest on a few yourself. But this is our first time really trying to produce and deliver in an ongoing fashion our own material. And as such, part of finding our way is going to be finding our way with this podcast and its voice and its subject matter and how we share what we’re thinking about with a broader community. [theme music] So I think as a way to wrap up this first episode would be, more than, than anything else Jesse and I are interested in what you’re interested in. What are the challenges that you’re facing, that you might like a perspective on? Or, experiences we’ve had, in both consulting and in corporations that maybe you’d like to hear more about, and tell us, let us know. In our show notes, there will be ways of contacting us. You can always hit us up on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. We want this to be a dialogue, so, let us know, what you’d like to hear from us, and that will help us better understand our path forward, as we figure out what it is that, well, frankly, what it is that we’re doing here. Jesse: Join us once again as we continue finding our way. Peter: Yeah. Great. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Actually one– one name idea that I had an immediately threw out early on was Satisficing, just because I always loved that, that concept of sort of merely adequately muddling through. Peter: Is it good enough? It’s good enough, fine. Jesse: It’s The Good Enough Podcast. Peter: You could listen to better podcasts, but why? This one’s good enough. I mean, that’s how most people choose what they watch on Netflix. Jesse: That’s right. That’s right. All right.  Peter: Well, that feels good. Jesse: So,with that in mind, would you like to improvise an opening? Peter: No. Hold on, let me, let me see here. Let me get back to the, ’cause it was, it was me in the intro… Jesse: Isn’t this where we came in?