Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated, and then hand-edited. It may contain some errors.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: On today’s show, design leaders are feeling some major shifts in the landscape these days. In the wake of COVID and sweeping industry layoffs, leaders are facing difficult questions about the value of design, both from inside and outside the field, while new technologies and a chaotic job market make the future of the work harder to see than ever.

Peter and I take some time to explore what’s going on with design leadership here in the spring of 2024 today on Finding Our Way.

Hello, Peter.

Peter: Hi, Jesse. How are you? 

Jesse: Welcome to the show.

Peter: I’ve been here. 

So we’ve been having a lot of really rich conversations with a variety of different design leaders about their challenges. And those have been really great. But there is something larger going on out there in the world of design leadership. And I wonder if we can take some time today to try to put a name to it and kind of define the parameters of the elephant in the room here.

Peter: Name it to tame it.

What’s going on with leaders these days?

Jesse: Yeah. So what’s going on with design leaders these days? 

Peter: Oh, you know uh, the usual. What’s going on with design leaders? So many things. I found myself, in the last six months, part of a number of conversations around the state of the industry, where things are going, whether it’s on LinkedIn or these recorded conversations.

A lot of them have taken as a jumping off point. Robert Fabricant’s article on the big design shakeup that he wrote for Fast Company, reflecting on what he’s seeing as some step change that’s occurring, and the struggles that design leaders are having with figuring out, like, what to hold on to, to take them to what’s next.

And I think what’s going on with design leaders is there’s a recognition that what we’ve been doing for the past 20 to 25 years…

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: You know, I’m thinking about around the time we started Adaptive Path, maybe a little bit before then, there was an evolution,, a curve, at times gentle, at times quite bumpy, but, you could draw a line between 1997 or 8 and 2022, in terms of what was going on with design and thus design leadership.

And it feels like something in the last two years has broken such that we can no longer rely on that trend just to continue to carry us forward. But it’s not clear what the new thing is to hold on to, and so design leaders are struggling with their relationship of, like, what’s next? What’s expected of me? How do I show up?

Because it’s not clear for many people, not even just in design. I, think we’re seeing this… I listened to a podcast interview that Lenny Ratchitsky did with Marty Cagan. And one of my takeaways from that is that product management is in a similar vein of disruption. 

Jesse: Oh, it’s just as bad on that side. Yeah, absolutely. 

Peter: I think we’re in this phase shift. And we’re in this middle of it, but you can’t really be in the middle of a phase shift, right? You’re either in one state or another, but we’re no longer in the prior state. We don’t know what the next state is. And I think a lot of the tsuris, a lot of the agita, the anxiety that we’re sensing out there is because we’re in this uncomfortable middle space.

The value proposition of design

Jesse: Hmm. You know, as I think about trying to describe the shift that’s happened in the last few years, and I think it goes back more than the last two, but definitely in the last five years, I feel like there has been a real shift in the way that business has framed the value proposition of design.

And for this generation of design leaders, they’re very attached to a particular value proposition of design that has to do with product discovery. It has to do with customer insight. It has to do with experiential exploration as a way of discovering new product opportunities in the market. The value proposition there has paid off in a very inconsistent fashion over the last 25 years.

And there are now quite a lot of, because of the growth of the field, because of the hockey stick curve that we’ve been on, there are now a lot of organizations that are finding plenty of value in the market without ever engaging with any of these practices, which then has their competitors looking at it and going, why are we investing in this stuff when we’re getting incrementally better results?

Peter: Yes, I think this, actually, also leads to one of those parallel conversations happening in product management, because if you read you know, Marty Cagan and you have this view of the world of product managers as, you know, empowered leaders who, given an outcome to realize, have the autonomy to figure out how to get there…right?

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Mm hmm.

Peter: And that’s this kind of common conception from your product management thought leaders, your Marty Cagan’s, your Perri’s, of how product management works, but then, this came up on the Lenny Ratchitsky show, there’s this recognition, most product managers, like, well into the majority, 70%, 80 percent, maybe more, are operating in what would be called a feature factory environment, where they’re not empowered, where someone else has said, this is what you’re going to build, you can figure out how you want to build it. Sure. But this is what we’re doing. 

Those decisions have been made outside of that team. And, I forget who wrote it, but there was a product thought leader who was like, yeah, feature factory PMing is fine. That is right for some contexts, similar to this conversation, where mediocre-ish design is fine in some contexts, not necessarily every business will benefit from superlative design.

And that’s a tough pill to swallow, I think, for a lot of leaders.

Jesse:  Or at the very least the threshold of diminishing returns kicks in way sooner for some businesses…

Peter: right, right, right. 

Jesse: …than for others. 

Peter: Erika Hall talks a lot about exchange of value, right, between the business and customers, and the source of that value exchange might not be rooted in something that user experience design has a meaningful impact beyond a very basic, like, functionality threshold.

Jesse: Hmm. You know, when I think about when we started Adaptive Path and the value proposition that we were putting forward into the market, I’m reminded of the arguments that we had internally, the seven founders, about whether to call what we did design, even, because, you know, truth be told, our deliverables at that time didn’t look like design deliverables 

A wireframe was an exotic, strange thing. If anybody had in-house designers, they were working in Photoshop. We at Adaptive Path literally had no one with those skills. So we were trying to define user experience as something that was little bit different from, and a little bit distinct from a traditional design discipline. Over the years, , the value proposition that emerged there was that the same practices of customer insight the same practices of experiential exploration that are a normal part of a design process could also benefit business processes as well. And that’s where the whole design thinking methodology comes from, among other things.

That value proposition was a strong one during a time when there was a lot to be discovered, when there were not a lot of best practices to draw on, when nobody really knew what a lot of this stuff was going to look like, and we had to make it all up. 

That’s simply not where we are anymore. And those processes and practices, that value proposition, has a lot less potency in most product categories these days because the exploration and the discovery has been done. The best practices are there. There’s no need to reimagine the shopping cart. We’ve had 25 years 30 years of shopping carts.

Peter: Yeah. So let me start with where you are and then I want to pull it broader. We’ve had 30 years of shopping carts. That is not an interesting problem to solve. Much like onboarding a new customer is not an interesting problem to solve. They fill out their name and password. They put in some information, they give you some money, whatever.

But, we still treat onboarding flows as if they’re some source of innovation or some opportunity for innovation. And one of the things that you’re touching on that I think reflects the discombobulation that we’re feeling in design is, especially for those of us who’ve been doing it for 20-some years, is we haven’t taken into account that we came in where all of it was interesting. We published a report in 2002 on how to design a registration flow right? Because like, it was an interesting problem to solve, but we also recognized, like, 20 years ago, like, let’s just solve it once and everybody just use this thing. At this point, that stuff is basically done. 

Commodification of UI design

Peter: And I think what design leaders have trouble recognizing is just how much of, I’m going to say this intentionally, UI design is commodified, is not strategic, is not interesting anymore.

Much like… I tend to draw an analogy to residential architecture. Plumbing is commodified. Electrician work is commodified. Your basic contracting is, roofing is commodified. It’s not that it’s not important, but there’s a way to do it. You do it the same way. There’s standards and practices and codes. Just follow it and done. 

We still want to treat it like it’s a source of inspiration and new thinking. And so learning to let go of that, I think, has been a challenge for design leaders. There’s an opportunity that we as a community are missing of building a workforce of UI designers, highly trained UI designers who can design to code, who could come out of programs, like, in a community college. 

You know, you should be able to get an associate’s degree in software UI design. Instead what we’re doing is we’re asking people with 10 to 15 years experience to design onboarding flows. ‘Cause that’s, who we have around. We’re not staffed appropriately. 

Let me finish with one last thought though, which is reflecting on one of the conversations we had, which was with Rebecca Nordstroem from LEGO. 

She was this first UX designer on this manufacturing and supply chain team. And they realized, oh yeah, we’ve got some software, so we should have a UX designer on it. So she showed up and she did some UX design. And then she asked, what are your other problems? And they said what their other problems were. And she’s like, I think I can help with those too. And they weren’t UX screen based design problems, right? They were more systemic, more procedural challenges throughout supply chain and manufacturing that she realized, Oh, I can apply my UX design abilities to all kinds of problems that would not be considered standard UX challenges.

And what I like about that is she didn’t define herself by her medium. She defined herself by… I am a capable problem solver with a set of tools, sic me at your problems and I can help you resolve those. And I think that shift is one that a lot of design leaders have not made.

They’re too rooted in the media and material of their practice and not in the opportunity of their practice.

Jesse: I can see that. I can see that. I can also see those opportunities being pretty tightly constrained by the environments that they’re in, and the mandates that they’re given, and the way that their roles are framed. 

You know, a lot of the fear and anxiety that I’m hearing out there comes from the fact that these design leadership roles, which used to be positioned as pretty highly strategic roles, influencing product strategy, product direction, product roadmaps, that kind of thing, are now being recast and reframed as operational delivery style management roles.

The disjunction

Jesse: And there’s this significant disjunction for people with what they thought their value proposition was, what they thought they could offer. And they haven’t been able to get the traction that Rebecca was able to get in demonstrating value in small ways that opens up those larger opportunities because nobody’s even giving them the small opportunities because they’re like, you’re our pixel factory; why do you care about all this other stuff?

Peter: I imagine … this didn’t come up, that Rebecca might’ve been met with some of that resistance. I suspect… This speaks to how you and I interface with different audiences in our practices, because what you’re saying in terms of the strategic alignment of the senior most designers getting taken away and, retrenchment to production, I am not seeing that with the audiences that I’m working with. 

There is still a desire. I’m working with companies hiring sometimes their first design executive because they want a design leader in those discussions.

Jesse: I’m not disputing that aspect of it. I’m definitely seeing that part too. 

Peter: I guess then it’s lumpy. 

Jesse: Yeah, it is lumpy. It absolutely is. It continues to be the best of times and the worst of times.

Peter: A concept I’ve been recommunicating a lot over the past year is the Leadership Ceiling. Our conversation with Tim Kieschnick a few years ago now. And, there are folks who are hitting a ceiling that they can’t move above. 

But what the Rebecca story said to me is that I think too often designers make their own ceilings. They are so wedded to a particular space and way of working that when even given those opportunities they don’t engage them. They think that’s not what they do.

Designers getting in their own way

Peter: They don’t recognize it as an opportunity. I am generally far more critical, and have been for 25 years, of designers being the primary constraint on their own ability to have an impact, than anyone else in the organization. 

Because what I see elsewhere in the organization is people looking for someone with answers. People are looking for someone to show up with confidence, and if you can show up with confidence, you can make more change than you think you can. And I think designers lack that confidence often in new contexts.

Jesse: That’s interesting because you’re suggesting that there is a cultural thread within design itself that holds it back.

What you identified as this kind of reflexive passivity, this learned helplessness on the part of designers, or on the part of design leaders, such that they can’t see themselves as being bigger than what they’ve always been.

Peter: Something you and I discussed a few days ago… In order to evolve, the need for ego death, right? They need to recognize that who they have been for 10 to 20 years is not serving who they could be and the impact they could have, and they might have to let go of what they thought were core aspects of their identity, say in craft, in some particular part of the practice, and be, you know what, I don’t define myself by my ability to model difficult interactive systems well, because that only was going to get me so far. I am needing to let go of that part of my identity and embrace a new identity in whatever that opportunity is that’s in front of you, whether as a leader or solving new kinds of problems.

And, I mean, ego death is hard. That’s why it’s called death. If it was trivial, we would just be like putting on a new hat and be like, Hey, I’m a new person now. These identity shifts are challenging.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. And certainly, if you have spent your career mastering a craft and advancing in your career by proving your value by demonstrating your mastery of that craft, it can be very, very difficult to let go of that mastery as being the source of your value. I think that for a lot of these design leaders, there is kind of a choice that you have to make, as to whether you’re going to take a more kind of operational stance where you are going to be someone who is going to build a really awesome design production delivery engine for an organization, or are you going to be a leader who’s going to take a more strategic stance and try to be the kind of design leader who is going to try to drive product strategy and try to drive product roadmapping through the work that you and your team are doing.

Peter: I don’t have much to say, but, but yes. 

Yeah, I mean, it’s… both designers and researchers feel entitled to work in certain contexts. And when they are let go, when people say we don’t need that practice anymore, it’s this grave injustice to this whole field that you let go of that team. And my thought is like, no one’s entitled to a job ever, anywhere.

And how did we get to this point of entitlement, this entitlement of “How I want to do it,” right? 

Jesse: Yeah, the orthodoxy. 

Democratization

Peter: Yeah. This is this whole democratization of user research controversy, which I don’t think is controversial, but a lot of people do.

It’s like, well, no. We should have trained UX researchers doing research. If we let other people do research, they’ll do it wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m like, okay, but, No. Like, like, that’s clearly not what others are feeling, and upon what rock are you standing, claiming that anyone building software must have a PhD trained UX researcher, or they’re doing it wrong? 

Clearly they don’t care. And so there’s a lack of self awareness around the nature of what people have to offer, the value they’re bringing into these contexts, and that was enabled or protected by, you know, a decade of really good times. And then when that tide rolled out, they were left exposed.

Jesse:  Hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s true. I think that’s true. The thing is, that these organizations that are not adhering to the orthodoxy, they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re not suffering in the market in any way for not having an army of PhDs and formalized processes and all this stuff.

It would be a really different story if we could all see that there was a lot of value being left on the table, but it’s simply an unproven hypothesis. And at this point, 25 years in, you got to wonder how much more time you give it to be proven out.

Design as a choice

Peter: That’s probably true about anything. Any function in a firm is a strategic choice. I was just having a conversation with another design leader who was talking about how she communicates to her team why a company is making certain decisions.

‘Cause sometimes, the team gets frustrated that design is not allowed to kind of practice to their fullness. And she uses this analogy of airlines. There’s some airlines like Emirates who spend a lot of money on designers and the experience, because that’s the value proposition.

And so if you’re working in a place like Emirates, you’re going to get to do good design on behalf of the people there. And that is their strategy. And then there are companies like EasyJet and Ryanair, located in Europe, who… their value proposition is cheap. Full stop. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

That is a perfectly legitimate… hundreds of thousands of people choose EasyJet and Ryanair recognizing that they’re going to have a worse user experience in exchange for affordability. And so I think we’ve lost sight of that variability. It’s not that it’s… that user experience is proving to be not valuable enough across the board that every company is going to sacrifice it.

But everybody was like, oh, we need to have a UX team because they all have UX teams and five to 10 years later, they’re like, what is the value of that team for us? Now in some organizations, lots of value. 

Jesse: Mm hmm.

Peter: I have one client, a single company that has multiple product lines and some product lines are worth investing in design and building out big design teams and in the same company, another product line is laying off half their designers because it’s not materially important to that part of the business, so.

Jesse: Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that’s the appropriate way to think about it. There are going to be a lot of different flavors of design teams according to the product, the category, the market, where that product is in its life cycle. 

You know, you can’t hit the ground running with a feature factory. There’s too much, there’s too much still unknown. You have to build your way up to that. So there are practices that apply differently. There are styles of leadership that apply differently at different points on an organization’s journey. So it’s extremely lumpy out there and honestly, probably just going to get lumpier.

Peter: And kind of a related, I think, trend line, starting in 2008 or 2009 with the financial crisis and the time of zero percent interest rates. And I think a lot of companies were willing to try things like invest in scaled design programs because it didn’t cost them much of anything anyways because money was generally free, and now that a lot of companies are having to practice mindfulness with their balance sheets, if they hadn’t realized the value of design in the last 15 years, yeah, they’re going to scale it back.

Others, others are like, no, this has worked. So, the state of things in UX in 2024 is way better, just generally, than it was in 2008. I mean, just in terms of the number of people doing it, however crappy so many experiences are.

Like the fact that any credible business that I engage with, has a mobile app, it has something I can use on my phone to get my business done. That kind of thing, even on the web, was not true 15 years ago right? So there’s been a general improvement…

Jesse: absolutely. 

Peter: …that I think gets lost in the pain of today.

Jesse: Yeah. The baseline for user experience in the world continues to rise. There’s no question about that. 

Peter: I think there is some question. There’s a lot of angry middle aged white people on LinkedIn who think we’re going backwards.

Jesse: I think the question is whether the practice of user experience design has continued to elevate along with the experiences that we’ve delivered.

We’re raising the baseline on the quality of the experiences that we’re delivering, but user experience design was aiming for the ceiling…

Peter: hmm.

Jesse: …not the baseline.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. There’s kind of a money-ballishness to this, right? Like there’s an optimizing of just how much UX do you need for what gain? 

Something that I realized a few years ago as I turned on my television, and it was evident that the Prime Video logo on my screen was a rasterized image. And I was like, that is a demonstration of a lack of care in design on Amazon’s part, right? And then I was thinking like, you know what? That’s kind of true of Amazon. Amazon, because they are a moneyball organization, right?

Lots of data that drives decision making. They have figured out just how much to invest in design and no more, to realize some, whatever that optimal result is. And if they, I mean, you mentioned diminishing returns. If they were to invest another a hundred dollars in design, they’d only get 1 back after that point. And so they stop, and they just stop at mediocrity. ‘Cause that’s what works for them and their business with their market. And that’s a perfectly rational decision. 

Jesse: Yeah. 

You can call it mediocrity if you want. I would say that you know, another term for that is good enough. And that’s the thing that designers tend to lack, is a sense of what is good enough. They’re always trying to close the gap with the perfect, with the ideal. All they can see are the ways in which the thing is falling short.

SNL’s “Papyrus”

Jesse: So this past weekend, Ryan Gosling hosted Saturday Night Live. A number of years ago he was on that show doing a sketch called Papyrus, which is about the typeface Papyrus and its use in the film Avatar. They came back to that character in that premise for a follow up sketch this past weekend.

And designers are all like, ha ha ha, I feel so seen. And I’m not sure you should feel seen by this sketch because this is about somebody who is obsessed with something that doesn’t matter. The choice of typeface in Avatar has made no material difference to the billions of dollars that the franchise has made. None. The extra dollar that they would have spent to choose a different typeface would have had no material impact on the project. So now the question is, what are you so obsessed with here? What is the ideal that you’re actually upholding?

Peter: Right. And there is a…

Jesse: And is it any wonder you’re getting yourself shut out of strategic conversations by advocating for this stuff?

Peter: Because you’re foaming at the mouth talking about typefaces. 

Yeah, yeah. 

Or 

Jesse: whatever your version of that is. 

Peter: I literally just watched that sketch last night, ’cause I’d heard so much about it. And I don’t have much more to say besides yeah. Like, yes, you feel seen because it feels like the writers are in on the joke with you, that, you know, this billion dollar movie couldn’t be bothered to spend any effort on their typefaces, but then the punchline of the second sketch is, like, the jokes on you, that shit doesn’t matter, right? And, this wild -eyed advocate realizing he needs to move on with his life, that he was the source of his own pain. 

Yeah. And I think that’s true of a lot of designers. And I think that speaks to, that’s a little bit of the identity and ego death, especially if you went to a design school, this thing that I was taught 15, 20 years ago as the most important thing. This thing that you have placed so much of your sense of self worth in, hitting the shoals of ignorance and neglect on the part of the organization around you. Understandable ignorance and neglect on the part of the organization around you. 

And you’re like, but my value system and, unable to move past that, looking at some of the comments to things I read on LinkedIn, I’m seeing designers who are retrenching, who are like, no, craft is even more important, like, everybody-else-is-wrong-but-me kinds of mindset, which ends up making them appear like the crazy man in the Papyrus video,

*Your* value proposition

Jesse: Well, and it’s such an interesting thing, too, just the label design and designer, and ways that people get attached to that. Because you know, in my coaching work with my clients, part of what I often do is I help them articulate for themselves, in order to articulate to others, what their value proposition is as a leader, distinct from the value proposition of their team or the value proposition of design as a function. 

What do they bring as a leader to the room, to any given conversation? And as we start to unpack the mindset that they bring, and the values that they bring, and the perspective and the philosophy that they bring, often we get to a point where we take a step back and I look at it and I go ,”This doesn’t actually look like a designer. This is about connecting customer insight with product opportunities.” Or this is about being able to envision things in holistic fashion. This is about being able to make strategic trade-offs. This is about a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the way that anybody else construes the role of design. 

But because you’re so attached to that label for it, you’re pigeonholing yourself, potentially, into a corner of the organization where you can’t be effective, where you can’t do the things that you came here to do.

So this is why I’m having this conversation with a lot of design leaders these days about like, if you want to do the job as you see the job, if you want to deliver value the way you see yourself delivering value, you probably should be looking at some product job descriptions.

Peter: Well, I was going to ask, ’cause now you’re helping people recognize their own complicity in their own ego death.

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: Right, as they’ve been the ones define the distinct value that they can bring. And the sum total of that isn’t rooted in their practitioner past. What do you see in terms of how folks respond to this? How do they take this in? And what do they do about it?

Jesse: It’s a process. It’s not something that we do in an hour. You know, I work with my clients for months at a time, peeling the onion. And sometimes there is a really strong emotional, kind of, coming to terms. A lot of it has to do with your history and how you got into the field and what that got you out of sometimes. For some people design was the thing that was going to allow them to use their creativity in the world for good. And reconciling themselves to the way that that’s worked out is itself a process that they have to go through before they can embrace a new identity.

Creativity

Peter: So many thoughts. Well, no, when you said the word creativity, that was a trigger because a week or so ago, I wrote a thing on LinkedIn around professional associations and how we don’t have a credible association for the digital product design thing that we do. We have many, but none that are really advocating for people who do this work in a way that feels meaningful given the problems that we’re talking about, this confusion that our industry is in. 

But the creativity thing, someone I just saw today, was arguing against what I was putting forth in terms of professional association, because they said “no one is going to legislate my creativity or my ability to be creative in however I choose to be.”

Like, it was exactly kind of the issue that we’re seeing, whereas this middle aged white dude’s definition of creativity and his need to be free to be creative as he sees fit is exactly how he is constraining his ability, ultimately, to have a real impact within the context that he likely wants to have an impact in. Those things are directly related, and many, if not most, people don’t recognize that. 

Peter: We talk so much, so fucking much about outputs, sorry, outcomes over outputs, right? That is a mantra that we in product design, we use a lot. Won’t shut up about. But when we say, in order to deliver outcomes, it’s not about you as identifying with your practice and craft, but you navigating this organization to, to make positive change, all of a sudden, a bunch of people are like, actually, maybe it is just about output. I just want to output pretty comps and shiny files. ‘Cause that’s, that’s what I like to do. And if that doesn’t drive the outcomes, maybe I’m okay with that. 

Jesse: Yeah. So you referred to the fact that we don’t have an organization that really everybody looks to, to advocate for us and there is this essential centerlessness to the community, to the field, to the practice but then when it comes to advocacy, what I wonder is advocacy with whom, you know, there’s no Congress to lobby, no producer’s guild to negotiate with.

Peter: There are aspects of the work we do that are already have been lobbied for, primarily around matters of accessibility. It is a demonstration of this gap that we in the user experience community weren’t the ones to get Congress excited about deceptive patterns. That’s a failing on us.

That’s a failing on us that we, we’re not able to articulate the problems with this thing that is core to our practice, user interface design, and how it can be used to negatively impact people, to trick people into engaging in things that they do not think that they are doing.

We didn’t have any representative function that could have found the right congressperson, got some laws, got the conversation started, got laws passed. That is something that is a kind of advocacy. You’re, you’re making a face. What’s the face?

Jesse: Oh, I just, you know, again, this kind of assumes that there is a mainstream of thinking in this community. And I’m not sure that there is, you know, I think there is no Us here. There are scattered pockets of different practices and different philosophies and different mindsets. And I think that what you and I perceive to be the center of the mainstream is actually just the opinions of the people that we are closest to and talk to the most.

Peter: Perhaps if there is no center, if there is no mainstream, there will be no advancement. There will be subgroups sniping at each other till time immemorial. and we’re just going to continue to squabble towards irrelevancy. 

Jesse: Digital product design generally, I think some part of it will always be a vernacular form. 

The UI Design Ecosystem

Peter: Maybe I’m out on a limb here, but something I’ve been thinking about is, there’s a set of interlocking components here, where it actually starts with, we need more basic skilled designers because we have too many people with senior and lead level skills doing basic level work. If we need more basic level designers, we need a way to develop that practice, that base. That’s where I think about things like how do we turn UI design into a community college, something you get in two years, but a degree of rigor.

But that degree of rigor means that there’s testing and standards that these folks are being measured against, such that when they get their degree in UI design, they are seen as worth putting into a practice with a baseline of understanding around human behavior, information processing, all those types of things.

And then you need a set of codes that can enforce those practices, right? So there’s many parts here, but again, it’s not unique. And in fact, it’s not unique to UI design. Many other practices have this ecosystem of operation. And I believe that UI design is too important to not take this on in some similar way.

Jesse: I admire the vision and I agree that such a thing in place would raise the baseline for our practices and for some of our outcomes. I still don’t think that that’s going to be the guard against malpractice on the part of designers that a lot of people see it as being.

Peter: I mean, something else that is inferred by what I was saying before would be a requirement of some form of professionalizing, whether it’s certification, licensure, et cetera. If you are in some form professionalized, you have protection now to push back.

To pull it back to, I think, the core of our conversation, the value of this is legitimacy. I think one of the issues designers face inside these organizations is it’s easy to be perceived as illegitimate because literally anyone can call themselves a designer. Five different designers have five very different sets of skills, levels of skills, et cetera. There’s not a mechanism within these organizations to often, to appropriately judge that.

You hire designers that might work out and it might not. There’s no bar that any of them had to exceed in order to be considered a designer. And if you were a clueless hiring manager, because you’re an engineer or product person or a business person, a startup founder or whatever, you’re just like, I don’t know, I like the look of the thing that you had on your portfolio.

I’d like you to do that for me.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: People get burned. I mean, I do hear this story. I know folks, design leaders have told me about how their boss will never let them hire UX researchers because in some prior job, that boss had bad experiences with UX researchers, ’cause those UX researchers did it badly.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: Not because there’s something wrong with UX research, but because they were exposed to something called UX research that was evidently crappy, did not add value. And so this person is now categorically like, why would I invest in that anymore? If that’s what UX research is.

Jesse: Well, again, it’s about delivery against a value proposition and making sure that that value proposition is clearly communicated and understood. That leader with the previous UX research team was, you know, sold something that they couldn’t deliver. And so tuning your value prop to something you can actually deliver and that is actually valuable to the business I think is the trick. 

And yeah, it’s true. A lot of these business leaders have seen a lot of design teams waste a lot of time. Endlessly, you know, fleshing out models of customer behavior that aren’t leading to material changes in the design. It’s like, why are we doing another round of investigation here? What, what… 

Peter: More journey maps!

Jesse: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so again, the diminishing returns really kick in there and it starts to be a case of stick to the stuff where you know you’re getting value from your design team and, and double down on that. And that, again, comes back to production and delivery. 

If we can’t have a professional association, what do you see as the way forward, do you think?

Ways forward

Peter: I surmised there are multiple ways forward. One that we’re starting to see is designers who are not wedded to the practice and the craft, willing to let go of design and embrace adjacent practices like product management.

And I would love to see that. The more we have design-informed product managers, the even better, everything is going to be, right? 

I had this conversation with someone a couple of weeks ago at one of my client organizations, kind of manager-level design leader who’d been offered, the way I understood it, basically offered a product job.

And he was hesitant to take it because he’s like, but, but my, my home, my people, my tribe, my thing, the thing I love, et cetera, and I’m like, I’m just like, go do that. You’re going to do more for your team in that role, in the product role than you are able to do in your design leader role in terms of their ability to have impact and influence and bring that customer-centricity to the product development.

And so that’s one thread is, embracing other roles in the organization that enable you to have the kind of impact you want, even if you’re not oriented on practice. So that’s an initial thought.

AI something something

Peter: There’s something, something AI, something, I don’t know. I’m still figuring that one out.

If I’m hopeful about AI, it’s AI does the scut work so that the people doing design get to do the higher level, more strategic thinking, systems oriented, complex work. You’ve looked into it. You’ve, you’ve been pursuing AI ish stuff in design for a couple of years.

What do you see as a credible trend going forward?

Jesse: There are a couple of different facets to it. There are people who are folding AI features into existing products. There are people who are building brand new products, incorporating AI features, and then there’s the use of AI in the design process itself. This last area is extremely immature.

It’s been very difficult to get reliable results in terms of getting an LLM to provide anything resembling design guidance with any kind of consistency. So it’s still early days for all of that stuff. I don’t see AI taking away design jobs anytime soon, if only because the processes will have to adapt to accommodate the technology.

And right now I’m not seeing that happening.

Peter: You’re not seeing processes yet adapting just because everything is so new? 

Jesse: I don’t see anybody changing their processes to integrate new tooling.

Not from what I’m hearing. I’m sure that it’s out there, but no tool has yet been good enough to inspire somebody to revise how they do user experience design. Put it that way. 

Peter: One of the fears is that a tool is good enough that means we can just fire 50 designers because the tool does some aspect of the design work, and we don’t need, in the same way that, you know, an LLM can write my five page term paper now and get C minus, but maybe a C minus is good enough.

Jesse: So again, I’ll refer back to how you construe the value proposition of design. If the value proposition of design is you know, ship screens faster, AI is going to be a really important part of how you achieve what you want to achieve as a design leader. If the value proposition of design for you is more around customer insight and driving product strategy There are different opportunities there, and the human element, I think, plays a much stronger role in that aspect of it. 

Peter: Multiple times you’ve returned to this concept of value proposition. And I’m guessing that’s something you’ve arrived at after some period of work, practice, reflection, whatever. I’m wondering what you see in terms of that resonance of this concept of, designers and design leaders, articulating a value prop, doing the work to identify their value prop, why has that seemingly become so central to your thinking around this?

Jesse: It is frequently the pinch point. It is frequently the place where the design leader is disconnected from the rest of the organization in some way. It has to do with how aligned they are with their leadership and with their partners about the value that they’re there to provide. And it’s important for leaders not to make too many assumptions, stepping into a new role about what people think you’re there to do.

And I, you know, I work with a lot of leaders who just haven’t asked enough questions of the executives, of their partners, about the role of design in the process, and what they see as the value of design in product development, where they see design participating.

And so first we have to unpack the design leader’s own model of these things, and then do the gap analysis against what they’re hearing back from the organization, and then figure out how to reconcile that.

Peter: When a design leader has articulated a value proposition, is this something that you encourage them then to be explicit about within their work, and to share that with their leadership and their peers?

Jesse: It depends on the situation. It depends on how bad the disconnect is. Sometimes, yeah, it is about a propaganda campaign. Sometimes it’s more subtle and thematic.

Peter: Are you familiar… something that came up in one of my leadership training classes is a user manual of yourself, right? Atlassian has advocated for this process. Is that a, and so this would fit into that.. 

Jesse: Yes. 

Peter: Are you an advocate for that kind of thing? 

Jesse: Yes. 

I am actively working with clients on their user manuals. Yes.

Peter: The impression I got is that, at least through your work with design leaders, these design leaders feel that whatever their value and value proposition is, has a perhaps greater delta, or there’s a bigger gap, between that and what the leadership, business leadership, et cetera, values or expects from them in design. But I’m wondering if you have any insight into, is that specific about design or does every function feel that their value or values have a gap, or are there certain functions that are feeling more disconnected to the overarching value system than others?

And again, you might only know this from a design lens, but does there seem to be something specific about designer unique to design in this framing?

Jesse: I wouldn’t say it’s unique to design. It is, I think in part, an artifact of design’s age as a function in these organizations. It just simply hasn’t been around as long. I think also design’s value proposition has been a moving target. As we’ve been talking about for the last 25 years.

And so there is some need to clarify, to elicit some shared understanding, you know every one of those executives is coming into the room with either some past experience working with design or not. In either case, you’ve got to reconcile those different views of it in order to align on a value prop.

Peter: And that’s something I stress with all the design leaders that I work with. I’ve been doing a bunch of work with Chase Bank over the last two and a half years. It’s a quickly growing team from 350 to over 900 people in just the one team that I’m supporting. So even within this team, there’s a lot of newness, people with a lot of different backgrounds.

Some people with financial services backgrounds, some people with tech backgrounds, a lot of people with agency backgrounds who, even within the user experience organization, there’s a lot of different points of view as to what their job is given their backgrounds and then they’re interfacing in turn with product leaders, some who’ve been at the bank for 20 years and have a, probably, a very legacy and outmoded view of design. But then other product leaders they’ve brought in who are new, who they, in fact, these designers might be more aligned with the new product leader than that product leader is with their peers who’ve been at the bank longer and just navigating all this… 

Jesse: Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, this is the thing that I’ve seen more than once with new leaders coming into an organization, where they’re hired into an organization they felt a really strong alignment with the manager who hired them and they get in and they find out that that manager has no alignment with the level above them and they can’t get anything done. Surprise! Leadership ceiling 

Peter: Weren’t we going to try to finish this on a high note? 

Jesse: Yeah? Oh, dammit.

Peter: Um, I don’t know, I think the highest note for me and it’s, one of my few drums to beat, is that I think design and design leaders will succeed most when they get over themselves and focus on the problems and focus on the impact and less on the process and things like quote craft. 

And it’s kind of that simple. And I think the more we do that, the more we will realize greater influence and the more it will actually benefit the practice of design, right? ‘Cause this is, as I’m saying this, this is something I think about with respect to working with design executives, design executives who’ve come up through the practice often want to stay rooted in the practice.

And what they don’t know is, by staying rooted in the team, that they are actually doing those people a disservice, because in their role, they have special access granted to the people with real power and authority in the organization. And the best thing they can do for their team is to ignore their team. And spend a lot of time with the senior leadership who have access to money and resources and strategic direction, spend that time up there. And then through that work, it will benefit that design org because of your ability to help shape or move those questions. 

But if you’re just managing down and ignoring all the leadership stuff, yeah, your team is going to stultify.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Design needs allies, period. Design needs allies to succeed. The design leader has to be in the role of cultivating those allies. And honestly, if you’re feeling stuck as a design leader, maybe it’s time to go become one of those allies.

Peter: I like that. That’s a good place to stop.

Jesse: Thank you so much, Peter. This has been great.

Peter: This has been fun.

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

Peter: I’m like, how are people going to make sense of what the hell we just spoke about? But I… 

Jesse: That’ll be, that’ll be part of the fun. 

I trust our audience. They can keep up.