Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Fred Truman, Senior Director of Product Design at MongoDB

By Kristie Craft

It’s human nature to feel like we have little to contribute to the world or society. In everyone's story there's always a unique path that people have taken that inspires others. So throughout our Inside The Mind of Design Leaders series, it's not about the Elon Musks of the world, or those who are ‘conquering’ it. It’s about those we can relate to. 

Kristie Craft sat down with Fred Truman, Senior Director of Product Design at MongoDB, to discuss his career path. They went right back to where his unintentional journey within the digital design space started.

Kristie: How did you get into design? When did you realise that you were going to take it as a career path?

Fred: “I don't think there was ever a moment where I thought, ‘Okay, I want to be a designer’ per se, but I was always into art.

When I was young, I was always drawing and doodling, but I was also into math and computers.

In high school, I started making websites. This was back in the 90’s, and you know, we didn't know what those things were. So I took an independent study, which was really cool.

My mom would always tell me about Commercial Art. That you could make a career and you could make money creating art. I think she was talking about Graphic Design.

Over time through high school, I was on a normal academic path, but I was interested in being creative and taking art classes. When I had to go to college, I studied Graphic Design because I thought it was a path towards being able to have a career and that it was going to pay the bills. That's how I got started.” 

Kristie: Did you do an internship or work throughout your studies? 

Fred: “I was definitely unstructured. In my undergraduate degree, it was Liberal Arts Education. I would focus primarily on Graphic Design, Art History... I was dancing around in that space. 

When I went to university, this was when ‘branding’ was a big thing. We were talking about branding a lot and no one knew what this was back then. I went to George Washington University and within the Creative Services department we really focused on building a brand for the university. So I was fortunate enough to get a job with them, which was really great. I was making posters, pamphlets and little flash animations for websites. 

I remember before that, I tried to apply for an internship or a job, and it was a disaster! I didn't have any sense of what someone who would hire a graphic designer would look for. I remember handing over real raw work samples. It was art, basically, it wasn't solving any problems. The education that I received wasn't like the calibre of education that is provided now for a Designer. So I give myself a little bit of slack there.”

Kristie: The state of education in Design has evolved for creative graduates. Moving on beyond education and throughout a design career, there can be both calculated decisions and organic progression. Moving companies, changing roles, working towards promotions and relocating cities. Throughout your career, do you feel like you were very calculated in the decisions that you made?

Fred: “I think I'm a very informal person. My approach to education and my career was very informal. Early on I knew that I liked being creative and found there's something interesting about technology, and I just wanted to do that! I was very happy just making things. Anybody who wanted to pay me to make posters, a t-shirt, or a website, I was happy to be doing that.

There was not one pivotal moment when I realised I wanted to be a Designer, but I can think of a time when I was working, the first real job I had in New York. 

Then I made a decision. 

I was working at a branding agency for nonprofits. I can recall a specific client, they help people who are dealing with addiction or other forms of abuse and people who are homeless. The founder had turned his life around. He had an accident and he wanted to leave the corporate world and just help causes, which resonated. I was really into branding at the time and they wanted to communicate their message more. During that process, it was my first introduction to user experience. 

Before the rebrand of the website, we spent some time talking to people who were in the local community and we were asking them what they would like this website to be, to represent that we're communicating what their community is. Out of that, there were some really specific, interesting things about how people wanted to use the website. 

So for example, I remember talking to people thinking they were going to say, ‘okay, I want the brand to be this reflection of us’ but really what they were saying was, ‘I'm involved in this community, I have a loved one, they have an addiction and it's really harmful to my relationship with that person. If I tell them they need help, I would love for this website to be a tool for me to reach out to them anonymously, through this community to see if I can pull them to get the help.’ 

And I got really stuck on that. 

It was right around that time where I started thinking, I could be making tools for people, I could be making things that do things for people, not just communicating. So that was the precursor to go back to grad school. Then from there, my career has been more or less intentional.

I just wanted to be a designer and focus on products and user experience. Then the opportunity came up here at MongoDB and I've been growing with that organically. 

I'm not super calculated in that regard. I knew I wanted to be working in technology, I knew I wanted to be working in user experience, but I never knew I wanted to be in management, I didn't know it was a thing. That was a whole other growth point and pivot for me. It was a new and different way of thinking about my career that happened, and it happened organically.” 

Kristie: Growing into a managerial role isn’t always plain sailing. What were the challenges that you faced going from taking on that managerial role?

Fred: “It wasn't natural at all. It’s not silly or trivial; looking back now it's hard to imagine how you would get stuck on it, but it's really, really hard. One of the first opportunities, I had to manage somebody who I had worked with as an intern, and then I worked with them on a product that was very familiar to me. So it was a really good chance for me to continue to mentor them in a similar way. 

I think it was hard to separate the role of a manager, from thinking, ‘in order to be a manager, I have to be an expert designer, have to have all the answers, people have to come to me first.’ That feeling that you're on the hook for everything.

Over time, you realise that it's a totally different skill, and you're not expected to know everything. Most people are humbled by it as well. You feel like an imposter. A little bit. People are looking at you like, Oh, you think you're a manager? Okay. Yeah. Cute, you know, that sort of thing. 

So that was all really new and different. I think sitting in the role over time, it gets a lot easier. And then you get comfortable with the expectations of the role.”

Kristie: Some designers live by a certain philosophy, others work from instinct. As a designer, do you have a design philosophy that you live by? Or is there something that you have at the core of you that you always focus on? 

Fred: “I think the superpower for a designer in the context of what I work on, and product design, or user experience, is that everything we do is very ambiguous. Maybe for a product person as well, you know, nothing's been defined, and they have to make order out of that chaos. 

And then, for an IT or an engineer, it's ‘we want to execute this, how do we build it’, you're the expert in how and a designer... we got a bunch of stuff we think we might know, and it's very uncomfortable for an engineer to exist there. They just want to know ‘what am I executing, tell me what I got to do, I'll figure out what's the optimal way to do that.’ 

For a designer, I think we're great going into those ambiguous situations and being an ear or a facilitator, and sometimes a therapist. Because we have to pull in business needs, we have to pull in the perspective of a user and what they need. 

And then there's the team. You don't build things by yourself, you need to put yourself in the context of a team of people who are going to deliver this. You have to make sure that everyone's heard, and you need to turn that into something that you can, you know, show back to all of those people that resonates with them, the user, the business, the team. 

I really think that's a great thing to keep in mind. As designers in the brand space maybe we think of ourselves more as geniuses, but I think as a product designer, user experience designer, the solutions really come through us. We're just supposed to be there and let all of that information, all of those needs just come through us and show it back to the people that need to rely on them. You don't have to have all the answers, you can just let the answers come through.”

Fred: “The good thing about having a background in graphic design and working with designers who have that background is that they have really great craft, and you don't even have to work on it, which is great. 

So you can really work on uncovering user needs, investigating strategy, whatever it is, and you can rely on that craft.

And that's hard to teach on the job, to spend time like, ‘Alright, let's talk about colour and typography and space.’ 

It's not the problems that the business is asking us to solve as product designers as much, they're taking it for granted that you have that skill set sometimes.”

Kristie: When you’re hiring people, is there something specific that you look for that is beyond just the craft or ability to design?

Fred: “Curiosity will drive them in their growth in a way that static skills won't, necessarily. You can have great skills, but if you get challenged in a new way, you might not pursue that. Whereas a curious person is always going to want to see where this takes them.

I think having great communication skills is another thing. Just being able to communicate what your designs are trying to do, what they're trying to solve. Doing that in a really clear way, written or spoken, asynchronous and synchronous communication skills are really, really great and can set you apart. 

And then anecdotally, if people have good things to say about others, are good collaborators, that's really key. For people who can work with other people and bring the best out of those relationships, I think it is really important.”

Kristie: This comes back to my point about being emotionally intelligent to really understand how to work or get the best out of people, which I think is probably a characteristic or trait that isn't seen as highly as people should regard it. So with this professional evolution described, if you could give your younger self some advice, what would it be and why?

Fred: “So again, I think I was a really informal person. I want to say this the right way, and I want to say it with the right humility, but I don't think I necessarily pushed myself early in my career, the way that I see students and interns now. They're amazing. The stuff they're studying and stuff they know how to do. It's really, really incredible. 

And I get envious. Wow, look at how they applied themselves. And they're here working in a similar context that I'm working in now, and it took me a long time to get here. 

So I probably encouraged myself to just go the extra mile, because I think you can always get by without putting your full self into it, but if you put yourself into something you can really excel. If you choose to; you have to commit and choose to do so. 

But on the flip side, I really appreciate some of the other experiences I was able to have, because I wasn't taking everything as urgently or as needing to be solved right now. 

You don't have to have everything figured out in your early 20s, or mid 20s, or even your thirties, you know, you have a long career in front of you, as long as you're open to learning new things you'll get there. So in that regard, I'm pretty happy that I was able to take risks and there weren't too many dead ends. But those are behind me. And I don't feel like I missed out on anything.”

Kristie: This is great advice, especially for those people that are in the stage of their career where they think - Am I meant to be more? Am I meant to do more? I've seen within design, there's a lot more competition, there's a lot more complexity because of technology that is just increasing. And the speed is really hard to keep up with. The availability of tools has contributed to that competition.

Fred: “And Patience is important. If you have a good idea of what the big picture is, and you can commit to the big picture; the details and the path is going to be a little bit frustrating perhaps, but if you have confidence you'll get there.”

Special Thanks to Fred for his insights. 

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Koji Pereira, Head of Design at Lyft Business

By Kristie Craft

Kristie sits down with Design Leaders across the industry to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Koji Pereira, Head of Design at Lyft Business.

Kristie: I've been really excited to interview you, so thank you for being part of it. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into design?

Koji: Graphic Design was where I started. Growing up, I really liked music and when I was 16, I started a band. For me, creating posters for bands was my initial connection with Design. Then, I moved from the physical world to the internet by creating websites for bands and for my own band, too.

Few years later, I joined a startup that had this very interesting product. It was this very primitive version of Grubhub, or Uber Eats. We have a server connected to the internet, with a website. So people would go to this website, order a pizza, and then we had the server connected to a fax machine, we would send the fax to the pizza place, they would then deliver the pizza and get the money in cash. So, this was early 2000. That was the first product that I worked on. After that, we worked on other products, we had an SMS channel for daily horoscopes, a lot of crazy stuff back then!

Then I joined Google because of my product experience to work on Orkut, which was the biggest social network that Google had back then - it was the biggest social network in Brazil and in India. That was awesome, I was working on something that everyone I knew and loved, and everybody else used every day. It was the first contact that many people had with the internet in Brazil, and many parts of the world.

I continued to be at Google for close to 10 years, I was working with Google in Brazil to start and at that time, I was working on Google+. Most of my team were already based in San Francisco, my manager and all the designers that I worked on with, so I decided to move to San Francisco.

Kristie: It's always a hard decision, but I'm sure you will have an incredible life in San Fran now. So now, what is your current role?

Koji: So right now, I am the Head of Design for Lyft Business. Lyft Business functions like a startup inside Lyft. We create products and services that allow companies and organizations to provide rides for their employees, collaborators, clients, so on and so forth.

We work with both the admin side, who create these programs, but also the client side, the people who get the rides and how it manifests on the app itself. Right now, we have a team of 6 designers, 3 researchers, and 1 UX writer and we're growing very fast.

Kristie: Just to step back, your transition from an IC to a Manager, what were some of the challenges you faced?

Koji: Okay, let me just take one step back to talk about the leadership role, because I see the leadership role in parallels. One is the IC leadership, and the other one is a management leadership.

For me it was a very conscious choice that I wanted to follow the management leadership ladder. I was a teacher back in Brazil and I used to teach interaction design. I am very passionate about mentorship and helping people grow.

I also wanted to reuse some of my skills that I learned over the years at Google to facilitate conversations between xfn teams. Google is very well known for the fact that there is internal competition, so internal teams are sometimes competing against each other and it is very important to navigate between teams to align on shared goals. At the same time, you make your point and defend your team. I think that was something that I felt strongly about that I needed to continue to reuse the skills moving forward.

Then there’s the IC leadership role. It's a relatively new pathway, if you think about it, most tech companies right now try to have it. We have it at Lyft meaning you can grow up to the same level as a Director as an IC, by just working in your craft of design, and not necessarily managing someone.

Of course, craft also must grow in the skill of communication, right? How do you communicate your design? How do you move your team towards a specific vision?

Both paths are possible. I think both are very interesting ways to practice leadership. I personally chose the management ladder, because it's something that really speaks to my heart, and it's something that I'm very excited about.

Kristie: Exactly, well said! It’s something that a lot of IC designers have been struggling with, that pull between “Yes, I'm Senior, but I don't want to manage. So how do I stay senior and grow in my career without having to just be stuck in the same position”?

Koji: What I would say is, try to look for companies who keep career pathways very clear. Also look for examples in the industry and talk with those examples.

If you look for Principal Designers up to Director level, try to connect with those people and talk with them to understand what they do in daily life. Then look up for companies who support that type of role.

What I would try to avoid is trying to force yourself into something that you do not feel is for you, like management, it's basically having meetings all the time; it is about doing a lot of things that are not necessarily Design. There is a big aspect of it, which is basically human interaction, communication, and facilitation. Those things are not something that all designers need to do or love to do.

I think a lot of designers get to the top of their career where they feel like, "Oh, I'm in a plateau, there's nothing about design that can learn anymore, maybe I should learn something else." But some people will be like, "I know this, but I want to continue to work on my craft", because working on your craft is a constant iteration, you can continue to do it. It's not about knowing more; it's about practicing more. It's totally fine to be a Senior Designer for a longer time and continue to work in your craft. I think in our time today, people move very fast in their careers, and that sometimes can be daunting.

Kristie: Was there anything that you struggled with in the transition? Or was it quite an easy transition for you to become a manager because of your history?

Koji: I don't think it was easy.

I think I committed a lot of mistakes by trying to force a situation. I was really trying to be a manager and missing the point of the context and process of the transition.

You need to be thoughtful and you need to understand if you are in the right place. I remember, for instance, when I worked with my manager back at Google for a while, she said to me, "I want you to be a manager". She was the one who started the conversation. After some months of conversation, I was like "Okay, I think i'm ready" But then the fact is, when you’re an IC in a team, and then in the same team you’re assigned to be a manager, it becomes to be a very hard situation.

Now overnight, your colleagues respond to you. That creates friction that can sometimes be disruptive to the team dynamic. I think it took me a lot to understand that and thinking about turning the page and finding another team. There is a point where you need to understand where you are in the cycle. It's like a startup cycle, you get excited, you have an idea, then you have to pivot, something happens and then maybe you have a second pivot, with teams is the same thing. You have a forming process, you get excited and you form a team. Then you start to learn how to work together and there's a lot of friction, and then you start to deliver things in a flow.

Sometimes you get to a place where people find themselves with different purposes and directions, and then the team dissolves, right? But it's totally fine. You don't have to have a team forever and I think it took me a lot to think about that, because I am very loyal.

I stick around for a very long time, but then I think it's very important to think maybe the cycle is done, it's not that it didn't work, It's just that it comes to an end and that's fine. Now we'll move on and see what happens next.

When you are in a transition to management, you have to let go, not only of the fact that you don't have control anymore on the design, but also let go of the team if that team is not the best fit for you anymore.

Kristie: I think it’s a common feeling between designers that become managers, realizing that you have to be hands off to allow people to grow and like you said, it's especially hard to transition from IC to a manager in the same team because design was your responsibility for a long time and your team still see you as a pier.

Throughout your design career, do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

Koji: I wouldn’t say design philosophy, but my philosophy is collaboration, I think that's the most important thing.

I think collaboration is one word that is used a lot, but to me, it tells me a lot about other things around it. For instance, to collaborate, you need to build trust. Building trust is probably the first stage and second, you need to really build empathy with your teammates. If you don't have that you can't collaborate, right?

An engineer will not collaborate the same way that a PM will collaborate, or a Designer will collaborate with you. So really trying to understand that people have different ways of thinking, working, and building that is part of the collaboration.

I think the last part is that collaboration opens the design process. Historically, Graphic Design was very different from what we have today. It was way more linear. Now, there are more iterations and there are so many things happening at the same time.

How do we open the design process in a way that is not just the outcome, right? Designers go to a cave, work on the design, and then show up with the result. Which sometimes happened in the past with graphic design, especially in the 90’s. Right now, it needs to be way more dynamic.

I think tools like Figma, where anybody can go there and see what you're working on, this gets to a next level. In the past collaboration in design might be distorted because in the past, the collaboration was not a very strong aspect of design, but with design thinking and design sprintschanged that in the 2000’s.

If I don't have collaboration, I really feel there is something very important lacking in the design process.

Kristie: It's definitely true. Globally, how we live our lives now is more connected, in everything that we do.

Is there anything that is happening now within either design or the current situation that's really got you excited about the future of design?

Koji: We are facing a lot of changes and a lot of issues, the environment, COVID and politically with racial justice, and to me, the designer needs to be connected with everything that is happening in the world somehow. So I'm very excited in some ways, because I feel design can really play a big role here.

What I think is going to be crucial about the future of design, is to really take diversity and inclusion very seriously, because if we do it in a way that just feels like a slogan that we need, or a box that we need to check, I don't think we'll get anywhere close to fix the problems that I just mentioned.

If we really take that seriously, and have designers with very diverse backgrounds, even if they're working in something not related at all with these problems, they've got to find some way to include something that will make a change or will make a difference within their products. So, I'm very excited about how design can be a voice and be a way to connect these problems and serve them.

Kristie: Exactly, making it just a tick in the box on prolongs change.

I’ve been following your Instagram live series which have been amazing, and a breath of fresh air – for you, are there any blogs, books, podcasts that you listen to that really help you, either in your current role or as a designer today?

Koji: For books, I really liked the 21 lessons For The 21st Century. This book is amazing, because it just paints a lot of questions or a lot of issues that we're facing today in the 21st century.

The author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a historian, he talks about our century, how we got here and what the biggest challenges are. To me, it is interesting to think how do we as designers, design in a world with these big challenges? Say nationalism, religion, immigration, artificial intelligence, or nature of truth.

Another book that I liked a lot was The Art Of Not Giving a F*ck. The title was kind of dumb, but I really like the book itself. A lot of things that are discussed there are very, very connected to the anxieties that we have today in our lives. Being young workers in the tech industry, it's a common topic how we think about self-image, how much pressure we put on ourselves. It's great in a way that it really saves you from all of this craziness that we are today and gives a lot of crowd clarity to think about. The things that are really essential in life. Besides that the book is based on Buddhist learnings, so it's very interesting, you'll never expect that with this title.

Before I joined Lyft, I also read this book called The First 90 days, and that book is very useful anytime you have a big change in your life and you're joining a new team, for instance, or joining a new company. It gives you a very simple framework. Within 90 days, how can you build trust and deliver impact with low hanging fruit. It’s a great book about starting something new in your career.

Another one is Pivot from Jenny Blake, which is another book about life-changing events. It doesn't give you a framework, but it gives you a lot of learnings in terms of when to identify the time to make a change, and how to make a change in a way that you feel comfortable in, and that you’re doing it in a thoughtful way.

In terms of podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs… I basically follow the Design Collective, I think they have great posts about designing generally.

For podcasts, I love 99% Invisible. I was actually listening to some podcasts from James guy, he also has a podcast about design leadership, which was very cool to hear.

Other than that, I think the TV series that I really like is Deaf U. It's about People who are deaf, it's a reality show that follows in very mundane situations, like dating, they talk about life choices, and it's amazing because the whole series is in silence. You don't hear anyone speaking and they're just using sign language. It’s really interesting and you have to pay attention because it talks about accessibility, which is something that I'm very interested about.

Kristie: Yeah, I’m actually really into Netflix at the moment, just because they are bringing out some really interesting documentaries at the moment.

Thanks so much for your taking the time to do this interview. I’m really excited about sharing this with the world and what you’ve done with Cells and Pixels is awesome – so congrats. Looking forward to the series continuing in the new year.

Koji: Thank you so much. Thanks for your work. And thanks for inviting me and for the work you're doing for the community. I think this is very important, because, you know, there is this gap between what companies want versus what the actual experience of designers have in school. So all this is small gestures, like what you're doing right now really helps to create more clarity and help designers to find their own path. So I really appreciate that!

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Felix Lee, Design Lead at GoTrade & Co-Founder of the ADP List

By Kristie Craft

Kristie sits down with Design Leaders across the industry to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Felix Lee, Design Lead at GoTrade and Co-Founder of ADPlist.org

Kristie: Felix, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into Design?

Felix: I'm a Product Design Leader and Tech Entrepreneur. I deeply believe in constantly reinventing the way we experience the world around us and beyond, through design.

I started my journey back in 2016, when I was in an Engineering school. That might come off as a surprise for a lot of people because I was pretty much an Engineering whizz kid. I fell in love with Engineering, but I'm very curious and driven to make a difference. I felt like Engineering wasn't really my cup of tea in that sense. I wasn't really able to be creative with Engineering. So there wasn't any room for expression.

That was when I found Product Design (UI/UX). I fell in love and dived deeper, I started working on a couple of startups including Packdat which was acquired in 2018. Recently, I started the Amazing Design People List with the mission to inspire creative conversations worldwide and today is one of the world’s largest community platform for design mentorships. It has been an incredible journey.

Currently, I’m a Design Lead at Gotrade, a mobile brokerage that allows people to invest in the US stock market, starting from $1. Think of it like Robinhood, but for South East Asia.

Kristie Craft: Was the transition for engineering to design easy?

Felix: As engineers, we usually look from a point of possibilities. And a designer, a point of making impossible a reality. Being a student in Engineering school, you work with the same components and you work with things that are already existing.

I wanted to do a lot more than just working within a constraint, I wanted to explore the world and see what we can create. If we could do better, or do something differently, why not?

Engineering is calculated, whereas design is expressive. I think one of the best things about engineering I adopted is the ‘first principles’ approach which means that whatever problem that you solve, you have to break it down into the simplest form and solve it from the foundation.

Kristie Craft: And ADPList, how did that start?

Felix: ADPList happened almost accidentally, it was COVID-19, people were losing jobs and it was a crazy period. I remember that it was in mid April; when I was still in the army and I felt like there was more that I could do to help people as a Designer. So what happened was that I looked around on multiple websites for COVID-19 projects to help.

However, everyone was asking for engineering help but no one was asking for designers to help. I felt like there is a misconception that Design is just about beautifying things, or Design is just a “good to have.” In fact, Design is so much more than just about the looks, it is in fact even much more than the experience; it's about the way people think about your product, and interact with it at every point (see, hear, feel, etc).

As designers, we pride ourselves on problem solving. Come a situation like this pandemic, we have to do something. It’s a global issue and you’ve got to think of ways to help better the world.

In mid-April, many companies were announcing layoffs and so I created a public excel sheet where Designers that were laid off can input their details so hiring managers can reach out. That grew within the Linkedin Design Committee and then that spread. My team and I continued asking, what can we do for these people?

Then came the idea of mentorships. People that are looking for jobs have to prepare their portfolio for the next interview. That was when we started mentorship. I was one of the earliest mentors alongside my good friends internationally. Today, we have over 640 mentors, and we are growing closer to 1000 right now.

That was how the idea came about. It came from a place of sincerity to lift designers up and create belonging for this community.

Kristie Craft: It's definitely incredible and has brought a sense of community to the design world. There are so many talented designers globally, so bringing them all together is amazing. I absolutely love it and sometimes wish I was a Designer again, just so I can use it a lot more!

What were some of the top challenges you faced when creating both your startups and throughout your design journey, too?

Felix: One of the greatest challenges that I face is finding great talents and team to work with.

I’m a believer in working with an amazing team. Regardless of your role, you want to work with a team of people that not just talk great ideas but are incredible at execution.

At Gotrade, I’m leading design and at ADPList, I'm running the community and strategy. With a leadership position at two amazing teams, I feel grateful because these are great talents working together to change the world.

Kristie Craft: I think for anyone within any industry, working with people that you love to work with on a daily basis, who have that drive, is incredibly powerful in terms of what you can achieve. Do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

Felix: The first one is to be purposeful with the things that you do.

I do my work knowing the intentions of why I do it. When I execute, I ensure that there is a purpose and good intention behind the steps and actions that I’m taking. Great design understands the very deep, innate purpose, then craft your experience around that purpose.

The other one is avoiding mediocrity. You don't have to be like everyone else, you don't have to fit in the mold. That's something that you don't want to do because you want to stand out, you want to be yourself, and I think everyone should do that and take a stand for themselves.

Kristie Craft: Yeah, that's really powerful. I think, especially in design, challenging yourself, because you can end up working or designing something that isn't purpose-led or challenging. I think a lot of designers need to hear that. I'm glad you actually shared that.

What is one thing that is currently happening, that’s got you excited about the future of design?

Felix: Prince William recently launched this entire project called Earthshot Prize. It’s basically a set of goals for us to achieve every single year. It is a very ambitious set of goals that are sponsored by influential names, to help the earth become more sustainable.

I believe design will play a very important role in helping the world drive towards a more sustainable future for future generations. I've been very excited about that. I’ve started speaking to researchers and government officials in Singapore to understand the landscape. Whether or not, you’re a designer; I think everyone should be driving towards a sustainable future.

Design for me, it's just a means to an end. It could come in the form of Engineering, but in this case, it is Design. I'm just so excited and committed to be able to be a part of this defining part of human history.

Kristie Craft: That is so true, from a design perspective, you have to start thinking about how can we make people's lives easier, but more sustainable.

Are there any blogs, books, or podcasts, or any resources that are either helping you now in your current role or that have helped you in the past to become who you are today?

Felix: I read Medium regularly on people's thoughts about design globally. It is a very good way for me to get into people's insights and thoughts on a day-day basis. I read about five every day, they're really amazing.

The other place where I get inspiration from is by reading books. I am currently reading the psychology of money. It talks about money not being just a way of life, but also towards a sense of behaviour and psychology. I enjoy reading books out of the realm of design. It really inspires me by opening up to a completely new world.

Lastly, I am inspired by the mentors on the ADPList. Personally, I connect with every one of them and as seniors in the industry, I’d go to them for advice in/out of work.

Kristie Craft: Thanks so much, Felix. It's good to get your insights and just to hear about your journey. I mean, you are inspiring a lot of people around the world. So a massive congrats to you.

Check out the ADP list mentorship platform here

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Nafisa Bhojawala, Head of UX at Google Cloud Platform

By Kristie Craft

Kristie sits down with Design Leaders across the industry to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Nafisa Bhojawala - Head of UX at Google Cloud Platform. 

Kristie: Could you tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into Design, and where your passion for Design Technology came from?

Nafisa: I have always followed my curiosity, right from school to college, and through my professional career. I would never tell myself ‘this is my forever career’ or ‘this is what defines me’, it’s always what I’m interested in right now, and I’m going to learn about it. I started in Architecture and came to the United States to study it. Then while I was in Architecture school I got very interested in Design. I was taking Design courses, Design History, and Graphic Design Photography. I thought it was a more expansive Design education, I was very interested in aesthetics and the theory behind all of it.

I changed my major to Design and then in Design School, I got very interested in computers and how hard they were to use. I remember one day, I was so frustrated in the computer lab and vented to my advisor about it. She said, ‘Nafisa, you are a designer, you can solve this. Start thinking about what you would do differently’. That was my first experience thinking about Interaction Design and I was hooked from then on.

My advice is to find the thing that drives you from the inside because you will get a lot of strength and energy from that. If you don’t know what that is, spend some time uncovering that. 

Microsoft is where I learned what software and interaction design is all about. At a Microsoft or Google, you're not just concerned about what's on the screen, you have to learn the whole context of the user and also learn how products are built and business decisions are made. It was an amazing experience.

In my first years I did not think about anything but work. (I'm not recommending this, that was just how I was at that point. I was like a sponge, so it was great!) Then a few years later I realised I wanted to know how to build software. So, I changed over to become a Program Manager. Program Management is a unique role at Microsoft, it is a combination of many skills that are very transferable to becoming a better decision maker, communicator and driver, whatever your role. I was a PM for 8 years, and then I came back to UX to lead a team on Azure (Microsoft Cloud).

I joined the Google Cloud Platform team in March 2019, and have been a lead on Compute since then (Google Compute Engine and now Google Kubernetes Engine).

Kristie: That is an amazing journey through design. 

Just looking back to your point, which I thought hit me hard, was the fact you need to continuously chase the thing that is burning inside of you. I think that’s something that a lot people normally miss, either because they’re chasing something completely different, or they’re chasing the opinion of other people. When you start to figure out who you are and what you want to be, you become who you are in a pretty unique way, which is a testament to what you’ve done and accomplished.

So with your current role at Google, what does that entail?

Nafisa: I head up the User Experience team for Compute, which is primarily virtual machines and now containers. These are key building blocks of Cloud, used by every customer of Google Cloud. The users we focus on are Developers and IT professionals and Business and Financial decision makers for Cloud in Enterprise companies.

Do you remember those watches that were completely transparent, you could look at the gears and how they work? I mean as a child I had one and I was fascinated, I stared at it for hours and I would do drawings of it. This is like my world right now. It's fascinating to see how these things come together under all these services we use for work, education, entertainment, healthcare, banking, etc.

The interesting challenge here is, how does one user or a group of users make decisions and avoid mistakes at a scale and complexity that is beyond human comprehension. A lot of the work that we do is about providing clarity and comprehension, so our users can make the right call for their infrastructure. Abstracting away details so they can make decisions and know the consequences of those decisions whether they are about performance, security or cost. The scale is fascinating, and the fact that our customers are scaling up our service so rapidly is gratifying that we are solving real problems for them and making their jobs easier. We might have built 150,000 knobs, whereas they just care about five things. 

So, what are those five things and how do we enable them to just care about those and we take away the burden of the other controls. 

Kristie: It’s an incredibly complex platform, so I guess the knowledge and learning behind it must still feel like you did years ago, when there’s just a lot of information that you’re still learning every day.

Throughout your career, what challenges are the biggest challenges you faced as a design leader?

Nafisa: There are a few facets to being a leader in this space that need reflection and action. And you are hitting on the first one in your question.

The first challenge is - Making space for continual learning and growth. Personally, I have a rule for myself that I can learn anything, and I make changes in my work so I can keep doing this. You can call it practicing the ‘growth mindset’, or you can call it ‘a learner’s mind’ - there are many effective models to practice this. When you are working in an area that's being invented like the Cloud, right as you are in it, you can't expect that you will just know what you're working with. As a leader, you create an organisation that gives that safety so you can keep learning. At Google, we talk about psychological safety. That's a very powerful concept because that psychological safety actually frees you to take constructive risks, learn and do your best work. As an individual, it is saying ‘yes’ to something that you don't know yet, knowing that you will stumble and even fail along the way, but eventually, you will master it. 

Second is Knowing your users, your business, and the unique value that your product and its design can bring. And using this knowledge to guide your work and your effort. It's a very competitive marketplace where our users have great choices. There is a lot of pressure to make sure our product that our customers value and need. We can't fall in love with our own ideas, even if we are Google.

Third is in creating a culture of true partnership with other disciplines like Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, Sales, etc. I'm always thinking ‘How do I break down the walls between our various organizations?’ Because for true partnership to happen, which we absolutely need in our space as we are co-creating these things, how do I put mechanisms in place where my partners are part of our process and we are part of theirs. 

For me as a design leader, It's basically all in the realm of demystifying design and integrating with how software is built, sold and supported. I was a Program Manager at Microsoft for a number of years, and I use my experience there to put myself in the shoes of my partners. On the flip side, I expect the same from my PM and Engineering partners and believe that this partnership needs to go both ways to be effective as an organization. And the most important one to me is creating an inclusive team, and in technical organisations, you can feel excluded for many reasons. I have always felt like an outsider. 

I work in technology, but I'm a creative. I’ve often experienced dismissive behaviors because I was not deemed “technical enough” or not “assertive enough” or “not something enough”... I'm also a woman. Often an only woman in a room. I'm also an immigrant in the United States and a person of colour.

User experience teams can often be marginalized and not seen as areas of investment for a business. I stay connected to the value I and my team bring to our users, business and larger team culture. As a leader, I make sure that people know that they are equally valued as team members. Creating inclusivity when there is systemic exclusion takes effort and courage. I think about that a lot. As a leader, that's one of the things I will keep working on.

Kristie: I really like your approach. Feeling like you don’t belong is completely different for everyone. It might be that you’re in design, so you don't really fit into the tech side of things or, I mean personally, I'm from Zimbabwe. I come from a bit of a different background, even coming to London, it was completely different. How I talk is completely different to everyone else. There are so many things that everyone faces personally to ‘fit in’.

So to create that environment where you feel like you're part of a team where it really doesn't matter where you’re from, what you do, or what your role is, but that you all have the same goal. Isn’t it incredibly challenging?

I know you've mentioned keeping true to yourself, do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

Nafisa: One thing that I like to do is to make sure to understand the holistic context of the problem before deciding on how to solve it.

First of all, when problems come to me and I don’t accept the definition that’s given to me. I have to define the problem before I solve it. It's my way of understanding it completely before jumping into the solution. From Don Norman, one of my favorite design thinkers: “ A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.” I think it is a designer or researcher’s job to ask - is this the right problem to solve?

The other one is experimentation to reach the solution. There is no expectation that you're going to get it right the first time. Make a solution, try it out and then improve it, change it as you learn more. If you stay with that expectation that it really is about iterating rather than creating perfection at any given point in time, it gives a lot more freedom to actually look at the solution from your user’s perspective and make the right decisions.

Kristie: It takes the pressure off you trying to make something perfect or having to get a specific solution.

Nafisa: Absolutely, there's an interesting nuance here because craft is really important, right? But you have to know your craft and you have to do the best job that you can. So strive for perfection in your craft, but don't fall in love with a solution and say that it cannot be touched. Approach it like a craftsperson with dedication to details, precision, beauty, delight - all these things that we bring to our work. But be prepared to erase it all and start over to get to a better solution.

Kristie: Are there any books or podcasts, anything that you are watching that has either inspired you or that you use today in leadership or design?

Nafisa: It’s a long list and it changes depending on what I am interested in at the moment, there are a few that have stayed constant for me over the years. I follow the latest books etc. in our field. But I have a few favorites that have endured over the years.

I have been listening to Debbie Millman’s podcast, Design Matters. I find it really inspiring to hear from other creatives about how they approach their life and their work.

I really like Dan Ariely's work, his books are approachable and engaging and teach a lot about human behavior. His personal story is inspiring and his blog and podcasts are worth checking out as well.

I have long been a fan of Don Norman's books, articles, and talks. I found him inspiring as a young designer and his design philosophy still resonates deeply with me: Good design is in service of the human on the other side - the user. My favorite quote from Don (that is very applicable when you are designing tools that you want people to master as we do on Cloud):

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”

I also read a lot about Cloud and how it's evolving, because it is my playground right now! 

Thanks so much, Nafisa!

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Director of Product Experience Design at Mastercard

By Kristie Craft

Within this blog series, Kristie sits down with Design Leaders across the industry to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Jess Greco, Director of Product Experience Design at Mastercard.

Kristie: Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into design?

Jess: I'm a Design Director at Mastercard. There are many directors like me across our offices, but I oversee Design and Research for one of our products—this product happens to be one of the only products that is B2B and B2C. However, Mastercard is a huge Enterprise Technology, Financial Data and Services company. So, this is an evolution for the company.

I have Design, Research and Content Strategy working together on my team to deliver an experience that meets business expectations, but also works for our customers and their customers.

I went to college for Fine Arts. I studied Art History and Psychology. I wasn't really thinking about getting a job afterwards. So, I bounced around and did a bunch of things. I was super interested in computers and I figured a mix of computers and art could be a good way to be more employable and to always keep learning… all those good things that are double edged swords!

I went back to grad school for Computer Art. They taught us all sorts of things, some of which were more useful than others, but all of it really taught me how to learn and how to teach myself. I came out of it doing a bit of programming, a bit of design, a bit of robotics, a bit of sound art, and got a job doing design and programming.

This was around the 2008 crash; I got a job six months before graduation and just hunkered down. UX was still a new term and I wanted to be a part of it. I’m a voracious reader, a sponge, and I just kept trying new things.

Over the years, I had a bunch of different jobs… and as it turns out, when you look for jobs that are consistent with your interests, you wind up with a coherent narrative at the end without intending to. I really like working on enterprise things that are also consumer-facing; I like working on complexity.

My career path wasn’t really planned, and the industry was in a totally different place in the mid-2000’s. There was so much less that you could do in 2005.

As things begin to come on to the internet, you needed someone to help organise things, make them coherent and make them usable. I'm good at learning new things, adding things in and making it all coherent. I've worked as a designer, I've worked as a researcher, I've done content strategy work. All of these things go into providing a coherent experience for people.

Kristie: How is your role positioned within the business?

Jess: We have disciplines and each has a discipline lead. For instance, there is a content strategy person on our leadership team who is the resource for all of the content strategy leads, but they’re matrixed to my team. I also have designers and researchers that report to me directly. I'm still working on hiring official researchers, so sometimes we have consultants, sometimes we do it ourselves. I've also been teaching my team to do more; it's nice to be able to fill the gaps in that way.

Basically, everyone is on my team. Regardless of who they report to, I treat them all equally. We have one to ones and I don't let them get into a situation where people feel treated unfairly. I'm hoping to scale the team based on what we have planned for the year ahead. We are not very siloed at all and we are very much dedicated to our product.

How did you get into leadership? Was that just the evolution of moving around, or was there a clear time for you to step up into being a manager?

It was actually not the easiest step. It was a really hard step. I knew I wanted to, and I was already naturally falling into those situations, but my employers would decline to formalise it—they would be aware of what I was doing and decide not to do anything about it.

I was doing a mix of Service Design and other things in my last roles, but ultimately it got to the point where I realised I could have the most impact by shaping the rules, guidelines and point of view, before we even got to the point where we were making anything.

It was hard, I had to turn down a lot of opportunities and be very clear that I was looking for a leadership role. People don’t necessarily respect that, or they have internal biases that prevent them from understanding. They may not necessarily assume that I'm in leadership, maybe I look too young to them, maybe I'm not what they imagined in their head, maybe I'm too female. I've been with male friends and I've been asked, ‘Oh, are you a student?’ And my friend goes, ‘No, this is the person who helped me have a career.’

My career has not progressed at the same pace as some of my male peers, but I had more horizontal growth than many and I’m well-positioned now.

I'm so glad that I had that time, because now I can run a research team, and work effectively on the product strategy. I can work with my product designers and I can oversee the service design of our product ecosystem. All of those things I would not have necessarily had time to learn to do before. Still infuriating, but it worked out.

Kristie: What are some of the top challenges you faced as a design leader?

Jess: I would say that persuasion and influencing is a skill I've really had to build over time. Sometimes it's not what I say, it's how I say it. If I make the person feel confident that I know my stuff, then they're more likely to calm down. If I sound stressed or answer them in a moderately ambiguous way, their anxiety will increase. Then the cycle of requests for meetings and reviews accelerate. It has diminishing returns over time, because then the team doesn’t have time to get their work done and so on.

I would say that's been something I've really had to learn — it’s much easier to figure out what to say, and it was much harder to figure out how to say it, to give people the confidence in my expertise.

Another thing I've been really learning—and was not good at early on in my career—was de-escalating conflicts.

‘How serious are you about this?’ ‘How strongly do you feel about this issue?’

It’s a conversation that I’ve had with many people, and I’m glad that I can have those now… I would have been too nervous many years ago. Everyone assumes everything is a 10 out of 10. Sometimes it’s not, or sometimes they need to know why it’s not as big a concern as it seems.

Sometimes we debate about how serious an issue something is, and it’s great to be able to prove or disprove hypotheses. A lot of what I do is making sure everything is vetted through the process that we have before we show it off. Sometimes that means a proposal will come out of the blue from design and product to our executive team. At this point, they know that if I'm proposing anything, I’m confident it will work.

It’s exciting to have all of these pieces available to me at my current job, because at past jobs, I might have had part of it, but not all. Running the team in a way that is driving results without losing sight of people, learning how to get work done through others, coaching them to do the things that we need in the way that they feel is best.

I'd say my biggest challenge right now is coaching my design leads to not compromise pre-emptively.

Someone will ask a question, like, ‘Why'd you do that? I'm not sure I agree.’ Then they immediately jump to ‘We could do this instead.’ I want them to feel confident in their point of view and advocate for great design. What is the platonic ideal? Why do you think it should be this way? They're not saying change it… yet.

Getting them to express the rationale without panicking, that's what I want to happen. I want to up level my whole team so they can work really effectively with the stakeholders—without me needing to be there to facilitate.

Kristie: Do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

Jess: I just think that experiences should be as simple as possible, and they should tell you what's going on. So whether it's an enterprise experience or consumer experience, there honestly shouldn't be a difference. There are different amounts of expertise your audiences have, so you can have varying amounts of information, but ultimately, it should be obvious what you need to do. It should be appealing, and you should want to do it.

Some of these companies still think, ‘Oh, I can force things down people's throats, just force them to use it.’ That's not going to fly in this day and age.

My philosophy is straight talk with my stakeholders and helping people understand why the thing that we're offering them can help them, not forcing it on them.

Being a female leader in the position that you're in now, are there any communities that you're a part of outside your current role that really help you?

I'm a really active member of the Interaction Design Association and started running the New York chapter about two years ago. I think that org does a really good job at creating opportunities for people to learn and understand what's going on globally.

I would say the other group that I really like is Tech Ladies. It's an online community and they do events. It's extremely wel-run and well-moderated, I'm a huge fan.

The other one that I'm a fan of is Women Talk Design. They teach people, women specifically and non-binary folks, how to construct talks and share their ideas, practice them in a safe space until they feel ready to take it to their audience. They do a lot of great work.

Kristie: What qualities or characteristics do you look for in a person when hiring?

Jess: I'm always looking at the work itself. There are so many factors that go into that work and that shape it. What opportunities you were given, the way you capitalised on them. I’m looking to see if you just did what you were asked or if you went further, if you could see another opportunity that you could push, or did you try a different technique that added some value.

I'm also curious about process. I'm a huge process nerd because process is the way that we scale our impact. What I mean by that is, if your process works in multiple situations, that means by following the process we are more likely to have better outcomes. That doesn't mean the process can't flex, the process is flexible by nature. I'm looking for their level of flexibility and understanding of different ways of getting things done. If you're following a super-rigid process, you might struggle with a real-world design environment.

I'm looking at ability to articulate a rationale. Can you explain your rationale for your choices? Why did you do it? What did you push back on?

I think vetting requests is extremely hard for people to do without lots of experience. People are very eager in their careers to just take it, do it, show that they did it and get it done… but I would say that the mark of someone truly senior is the ability to question and reshape the prompt that they were given.

Also I look for a good attitude and openness to feedback. Early in my career, I really struggled with taking feedback well. I felt personally criticised, and I get it, it's hard, but it's not a personal criticism and it's necessary to make the work great. Sometimes we’ll debate an idea and I'll go, I haven't thought about it that way, let's change it. That’s what great design can do when you worry less about being “right”.

I do think it's important for everyone to feel like they have a stake in what's being built and how we move forward. I want everyone to be bought in. Getting my team to be really good at taking feedback, but also influencing people's reactions, and persuading then that their approach is actually going to work… The more I think of myself and my team as advisors and facilitators of good decisions, the better our results become.

How are you guys doing now in the current situation. Was it an easy transition going from the office to working from home?

Most of our team is in New York. We work with partners in Dublin, India and a few other places, but that’s not every day, which has made it easier.

The team has struggled because New York has had several waves of COVID-19. There have been protests, there have been helicopters 24/7. My team has gone through a few phases where they're just physically exhausted because they can't sleep; they live in neighbourhoods that are wild all the time.

Other than that, the team are very close. We were co-located with our Technology and Product partners in a space, and we were so happy to be there. Everyone liked going to the office, we like seeing each other and we like working together. Mastercard is fairly meeting-heavy, remote was not the norm, but everyone has adapted really well.

My team has really risen to the occasion and impressed me by how they intentionally reach across the aisle to bring people in before it's too late, before you're dropping it on someone. It does require more intentional conversation of ‘How do we take this forward?’ ‘Who do we need to talk to?’ ‘Who should we socialise this with?’, but I've also noticed that my team is getting really good at navigating the org.

I'm just super proud. I can't be everywhere at once, so I need them to be my emissaries. The more I impress upon them my goals—without specifying the means—the better the results. I’m just constantly impressed.

I've actually been trying to teach my design leads to be more difficult and to push back a little bit more. Efficiency is good… but after the decisions are made. We have to have those high standards and maintain them; otherwise things get watered down. A lot of the time people will bring “requirements” to us, and we'll actually push back on them and reshape the terms, because people won't realise how questionable some of those requirements might be.

My team has been building their negotiation skills. It's not necessarily the easiest thing to do as a designer, because you think your job is to make things, but actually a big portion of your job is to negotiate the terms that are used to evaluate those designs.

Kristie: Any blogs, books or podcasts? Or any resources that are either helping you now, or have previously helped you?

Jess: I am one of those people that can't listen to podcasts, I can't do it. I love reading though.

I am a big fan of all of the Rosenfeld media books, they're fantastic. I have pretty much every book on my bookshelf. I love those books, they’re extremely helpful and they're targeted by topic. There’s one on Meeting Design that’s just wonderful. I actually buy the dead tree versions because my husband loves reading them too.

I'm also big fan of A Book Apart too. They have a new one that I'm working through which I’m really enjoying.

Thanks Jess!

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Melanie Yencken, UX Design Lead

By Kristie Craft

Within this blog series, Kristie sits down with Design Leaders across the industry to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Melanie Yencken, UX Design Lead at Google.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into design?

I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. I started studying veterinary science but just before I did a work experience placement that showed me, I love animals too much to operate on them, after passing out in the operating room on the floor… I swapped all my sciences for arts and ended up studying Visual Communication. It was a last-minute decision. My brother James was doing the same degree at Monash University. I followed him into the role, which I am so glad I did.

I did my bachelor's, then I was so lucky to land a job as a Junior Designer at a small creative studio in Melbourne called Square Circle Triangle. I worked there for almost five years. I did branding and print design for corporations, they would always want to know how their brand would be expressed digitally. I would do some of the Digital Visualisations and realised I just love that space so much and made digital design (now UX) my speciality. I was able to design a broad spectrum of products, from large touchscreens installations, iPad web apps for sales clients to use, websites and mobile sites when that came along.

I decided to move to London about eight years ago, my father had lived there while I was growing up, I loved the city and I knew I would have access to amazing career opportunities. In London, I started at an agency as that was my background, and that was great as I got to work with clients like McDonald's, Land Rover and Oxfam. That was nice but I was really frustrated by the handover point, when you would finish the design process and then it would get into someone else's hands, we would have no more control, you wouldn't actually be able to iterate or improve it to test your hypothesis properly.

I knew I needed to go in house to have that kind of role, and I was really interested in moving into leadership early in my career. I had managed the intern programme with the first agency that I worked for, and I loved creative direction, probably more than designing. I wanted to go to a larger corporation where I felt I would be supported to do the management training. That’s how I ended up at eBay. Firstly, I worked at Gumtree as a Designer, Gumtree is a peer to peer marketplace over here in the UK. That was an amazing few years, where I started as a Senior Designer.

After 2 years in my role as senior designer, my manager ended up leaving, so they gave me the role, leading the design team. There was lots of transformation while I was there including the integration of User Research into our process, a complete redesign of all the products and the brand.

I’d been at eBay for a few years when I was approached by eBay classified’s competitor Schibsted Media, who had a fantastic woman reach out to me, Lydia Oshlyansky, who was recruited from Google to build a new global central team at Schibsted. I had such great conversations with her and one of the managers in her team, Valerie Coulton, and I thought how amazing it would be to work with these two fantastic women and be part of this global operation.

I joined Schibsted Media and I was there for a few years. I built my own central team in London and then over time inherited teams that already existed across seven countries. The team grew to about 32. Then Schibsted went through a reorg, they changed how they were set up and closed the London office. At that point, I started looking for a new role and had a quick stint at a start-up for one year.

About a year and a half ago I joined Google in my current role. I lead the UX team for a product called Google My Business, which is a tool that allows businesses to get on to Google search, maps and engage with their customers.

I'm leading a team of 10 Interaction Designers who work with a UX team of 22 people including specialties like UX Engineering, Writing, Research, Visual Design and UX Motion.

Was it hard being a young leader / manager, or did you get the same respect?

The point where I went into formal management was at eBay and it was an interesting series of events. I just happened to be mentored by the Head of Marketing at that time and the day that my old manager resigned, we had just got a new Head of Product. I was about to go on a holiday for four weeks, so I had this tiny window of opportunity to express my interest in taking my old Manager’s role to someone who had no context about me, or the team, she had literally just joined.

I had my meeting with my mentor and she said, what have you got to lose? Just go and ask, say why you deserve this position as Manager. I don't think I would have applied for this role without having had that mentoring session that day, it was so timely when you look back at it.

I put together a little brief about how I had been filling some of the responsibilities already and how I had some management experience, as it was a relatively small team it seemed to be a great role for me to step up into. I prepared a little document and introduced myself to the Head of Product, before I went on holiday, and gave her a written version of it so she could diagnose and understand.

I came back, got the job and I was promoted to manager. What was great about eBay is that they had formal management training programmes. I had access to quite a lot of support to step up into that role. It was a great place to progress.

The other thing that happened to me at eBay was that I was also part of their Women's Network e-win. During my career so far I had experienced the symptoms of being outnumbered in the spaces I was in by my gender. I hadn't really articulated what that meant and how that might be holding me back. Being part of this network really clarified what the traditional problems are with lacking gender diversity in the tech space.

I was inspired to then start my own Women's Network, London Tech Ladies. This is still running today with 4000+ women participating. We're going through a rebrand now and have built a new leadership team to take the network forwards. After leading LTL for the last five years and organising 45+ events, we’re now getting a team in place so that I can be an advisor.

How important is it for designers to be part of a community outside of their role?

It's so important, firstly to be part of the community but also to find those mentors for you. They don't often tend to be your actual manager. What I found at eBay, my mentor was the Head of Marketing, and they weren’t managing me formally.

I feel like that mentorship is so important because when you're younger you lack confidence, you're underestimating yourself in so many circumstances. Especially for young women, I feel it's pretty common that we underestimate our abilities, lack the ability to negotiate and ask for what we want.

Now I’m working as a manager myself and looking at my experience hiring in London, at one point, the team was 11 people, made up of 6 men and 5 women s. All of the men asked for more money and only 1 of the women alluded to a negotiation, the others just accepted what they were offered.

I know that’s a very small sample, but it really showed me how much support people need in those kinds of discussions, because it adds up over time. If someone gets 3000 to 5000 more with every job change that they do, by the time they get to the higher levels of their career, it's a 60,000+ difference in salary.

Early in my career I had people mentor me and help me with my transitions. They helped me to speak out loud about how much money I should ask for, or how to negotiate for more money. Now I'm doing the same, I'm trying to help other women with those kinds of negotiations.

What are some of the top challenges you've faced as a design leader or manager?

A common challenge is that women feel impostor syndrome and feeling out of place. Am I supposed to be here? Am I going to get caught out?

When I took my first manager role, I didn't have management experience. I thought, when are they going to realise I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m just making it up as I go?

It's not until you get the confidence to overcome impostor syndrome, that you realise everyone's just making it up and doing the best they can. That's literally how almost everyone feels, studies have shown that 80% of successful people feel impostor syndrome at some point in their career.

Then, another challenge is the change from designing to managing specifically. The skills are so different, and we promote good designers into management roles but it's a completely different skill set for managing people and setting vision and strategy, hiring your team, recruitment and mentoring, coaching, etc. - all of those skills you don't necessarily learn as a designer.

It was originally super hard for me to let go and delegate responsibility of the design execution work, because I was so efficient as a designer. I would be feeling this compulsion to micromanage and want to just do that work quickly.

Luckily, I had a good management coach whilst starting at eBay, so I was able to get feedback regularly from my reports and articulate I had these issues. I really needed to let go, I needed to allow others to fail to learn, so they can grow and be as efficient as you've been.

As I've had more seniority, the challenges become very different. I've done a lot of work in more recent years trying to articulate the value of UX, and how to show that to senior leaders who don't necessarily understand the facets of the role.

What key skills and qualities do you look for in a person when recruiting global teams?

Obviously, the design experience and the portfolio review is important, but it's everything that happens after that point which is the most important to me.

Understanding the Designer interpersonal skills, because Designers are not just “Designers”. To be successful in their role and in a team, they have to be collaborators, presenters, persuasive negotiators, facilitators of workshops, engagers of stakeholders and influencing experts.

Often those skills aren't necessarily articulated in the role of design, but if you want your design to be successful, for the end product to actually materialise to what we were imagining in the early stages, you have to be able to do many of these soft skills.

I will be asking design candidates through the interview process, how they manage difficult feedback, how do they work with engineering, what engagements are they having in their design process, how inclusive are they in the way that they design and really bring people along the journey with them.

Rather than working in silo, the collaboration aspect is a major point for me. If you have someone who works collaboratively and they’re open to other people's opinions, incorporate them well and bring them along the journey, they're much more likely to succeed in the role.

Especially at Google, that is so important because of the way Google works. You are often working across different teams product areas, you need to get a lot of different people aligned to the vision and it's not a top down structure in terms of the work that you're doing.

It’s not necessarily different for global teams. I think it amplifies the need for empathetic collaboration when you're in a global environment, because it's so much harder to build trust with someone who you’re not in a room with every day.

When I was at Schibsted, my team was split across London, Spain, Mexico, Hungary, Finland, Belarus and Morocco. We got together twice a year with everyone in the room and then we did mini gatherings depending on the work. When we were together for the week, we spent a very small amount of time doing “work”. The majority of the time was focused on building team empathy, learning to trust each other and figuring out who we are as individual people. The trust factor would be completely topped up, as I would see behaviours and collaboration degrade over time, people would start to feel distant from one another and stopped trusting each other. So then we needed to get together again, and top that back up.

When you're in a global setup, having empathy in terms of how you collaborate and the transparency you do in your work is amplified. Especially in these times today, where you can't get together. So the ability to form a connection, bring people along with the work that you're doing and expose the work at the right time is so much more important.

Do you feel like you’ve been more effective, or has it been harder to keep everyone engaged with the same vision working remotely?

I think if we were just working from home and not trying to work at home during a pandemic, then I think we would all be just as productive, even possibly more productive.

We're lucky at Google, we're already using all our own tools that are made for you to collaborate online. My team uses Figma for design. Everything is super collaborative.

The reality of the current situation is that we’re not just working from home, we’re trying to work whilst we experience a lot of outside trauma. We're seeing people going through really tough experiences, not just COVID-19, but with recent racist acts being highlighted and the social unrest in society. A lot of our teams are based in the US but everyone’s feeling that globally.

We just started a planning cycle for the next quarter, where we told everyone to expect to operate at the 70% productivity that you normally would, so we can reduce expectations by at least a third and help predict and plan for the loss of productivity that you'll feel.

I don't know about you, but I've had days where I just feel like there's a fog in front of me, and I cannot be productive in my job that day. I’ve been saying to the team that it's completely okay to not feel okay, because we're all just processing such intense emotion right now. That’s what's going to be our reality for a while.

Thinking about it sustainably, so that you don't burn out and you have a healthy work life balance is important. I'm part of a big wellbeing initiative internally for us to manage all this setup while we're in this completely different environment.

We're seeing that it's very hard for people to disconnect because the work and home environment is completely blurred. The ability to step away and have that time to de-stress is really affected in this setup. A lot of people have carers responsibilities, which makes it very hard for them to focus with kids and families to take care of.

We're also seeing some employees are having a completely different experience to others. For some people who have a good setup at home where they have the right kind of space to do their work, they're getting less distractions, and they're experiencing more productivity.

Then we have people getting the exact opposite of that, completely distracted all the time, all of these caring responsibilities and they just feel like they cannot do their job, and they're exhausted.

It's really polarising, we're seeing lots of different ways that people are experiencing this.

What is great about Google is that they've been so supportive in recognising this, that we're not working through normal times at all and we're going to have to work together to really make this work.

One of the things that is common across employees working from home, is the theme that we are all united in missing each other. We miss collaborating in person, and we miss connecting. I'm trying to work with the team to form different ways that we do that, find connection without taking away precious break/personal time. We've been doing a series of videos, sharing some of the things that are unique to us as an individual and changing some of our meeting practices, so that it's more effective and easier for people to contribute, rather than having everyone together in the room.

We’re still learning how to make this work.

Coming from Melbourne to London, did you find it challenging to translate your skills?

I think I was lucky enough. I’m not the biggest fan of design exercises because I believe all that does is exploit people who are basically doing free work and people don't necessarily have enough spare time to be doing this.

I did a design exercise which allowed me to show that the creative skills that I had could apply to the different circumstances, like this agency was working with, even if the things in the portfolio didn't necessarily completely match to what they were doing.

I think the challenge was the culture difference. My father lives in San Francisco. I've got an American/ Australian accent. I've been exposed to the American culture. In Australia, it's pretty common that you're able to speak up and be a bit more forthright about what you feel and what you want to do. Compared to the British culture, you don't talk about your feelings.

It's been interesting working for American companies, based in London. It was definitely a learning curve when I first came over in understanding how the different cultures manage situations in the workplace.

I've done a presentation recently about how I do inclusive management in the team. One of the rituals we do is a design critic every week. We came up with a written format, where everyone could write their thoughts on their own and then we go through the whole group one by one to share them verbally. We’ve had much more diverse feedback, we had everyone’s opinions being represented. There are lots of different ways to change the way you run forums to make the space for everyone to have the opportunity to contribute. Giving everyone a specific space to share, written or verbal, will give them the defined space to contribute. It seems like a small thing to do, but it means the meeting is actually inclusive for everyone and you don’t just hear from the loudest voices.

Do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

‘Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.’

The amount of times I've seen roadmaps full of features extending past 12 months, and I’m thinking, how could you possibly know that feature is going to be the right thing to build without having done any of the analysis, research and experimentation?

The way I like to work is to understand, what's the user’s problem that you're solving? Or what's the user need that we're trying to build for? Because as soon as we start iterating and understanding that, we will probably have hundreds of different solutions that we could come up with to solve that need or problem.

What you commonly see is people who are so in love with the feature, that they're blind to the indicators that tell them no one's going to use that thing, because it's not solving any problem that they have, or any need that they have.

I guess the ethos for the team is, test, test and experiment.

Designing on your own is going to be a big mistake. One of the designers in my team has been recently working on a really great new framework, which is an assumption framework where you get the whole team to sit down and write down all of the assumptions that your team is making when you're working on a feature or a new project. Then you can go out and test if those assumption are true.

Often these assumptions are just like myths that have occurred in the team rather than coming from analysis, or real insight so you’re able to figure out fact from fiction.

Blogs, books, podcasts or any resources?

Sprint by Jake Knapp, which covers the sprint process and how you do the whole UX process in a condensed period with different people in the organisation. This was so important for me and gave me so many ideas to work with. I run so many Sprint's using that methodology.

It's so successful it makes the UX process accessible to anyone who doesn't necessarily have to be a UX Designer. You can do it in five days, we usually do them in 2 or 3 days. You can go through that process and completely understand the role of UX and the value of it by the end. It's so powerful for stakeholders and people from other backgrounds to participate in.

Another book that was important for me in my career was Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.

I was at a conference when they were just launching it and I did the workshop with Jeff. It was the first time that I understood the intersection between Measurement and Analysis and the role of Analytics and the role of UX, and the need to experiment and learn.

Often the UX process is seen as a long process. The methodology of Lean UX is that you do a very small amount of work to almost fake the thing that you think you might want to build, just to get some feedback. So instead of building a whole app and launching it to see if anyone wants to use it, you just make the fake website that describes the app and you see how many people sign up. You can get some signals to educate you about whether your assumption of that product is actually going to make anyone want to use it.

Another book I love is Hooked by Nir Eyal, a guide to habit forming products. It’s a fantastic book about the human mind, how we form habits and how you can leverage that to make a product.

Just one really good podcast, Recode Decode. They do amazing interviews with CEOs.

Thanks Melanie!

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Martyn Reding, Head of Digital Experience At Virgin Atlantic

By Kristie Craft

Within this series, Kristie sits down with Design Leaders to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Martyn Reding - Head of Digital Experience at Virgin Atlantic.

Kristie: Could you give us a short introduction of yourself, and how you got into design?

Martyn: My design career started when I was 13 on careers day. I liked drawing and copying cartoons, but I had no idea that it would ever become anything that I did with my life.

Then this parent came in, who was simply the coolest person that I'd ever seen in my life. He arrived in a Ferrari and described his career as a designer, and that was it. I was completely and utterly hooked on the idea, through qualifications, college and everything.

I was completely in love with it, although I still don't have a Ferrari…

The first 10 years of my career were in agencies because I thought that's all you did. I had all the usual fun along the way with launch parties, awards, pitches, new clients, and so on.

Throughout 2010, the agency that I was with pretty much collapsed and I started meeting with other agencies to find my next role. I was presented with this opportunity to go in house and I thought, well, that's terrifying. I'd never done that before.

For the last 10 years, I've been product side and just found a whole new world that I have thrown myself into. It has been fantastic. A whole different type of design and design leadership is required.

So, my current role is Head of User Experience at Virgin Atlantic. Prior to me starting there, back in 2017, we didn't have a Head of User Experience or a User Experience team per se, so the team that we have today is built from scratch. We now have product designers, content strategists, UX writers, etc.

Our role covers all of the customer facing digital touchpoints. From the websites which exist in lots of different languages around the world to the app to the kiosks in the airport, to the seatback in-flight entertainment on a plane, and, probably more importantly, all of the gaps in between those touchpoints.

Kristie: When building out design teams, what are the key qualities and skills you look for in a designer?

Martyn: I think it's very rare to ever find a need for the same mixture of skills and personalities in every business, because I think each organisation has distinct cultures and distinct challenges, due to the nature of the product itself, whether it's travel, or finance, or SaaS, or whatever.

I'm very keen to always spend time determining what's necessary in that moment, rather than ‘here's my idea of what a good designer is like’, because someone who's fantastic in one company might just crash and burn in another company. It doesn't mean that they're a bad designer, it just means that they're a bad fit in that organisation.

There's not an awful lot of commonality between any of the people that I hire, to be honest with you. The clues that I look for in recruiting people are signs that somebody loves their discipline or craft, that they have spent time learning about it and developing their understanding in some way, shape or form.

It can be really difficult to succeed and develop teams, when you have people who just don't really care about the role that they play and the community that they're in. I look for those signs, I don't mind what those signs are, whether it's somebody who just attends a lot of events, somebody who writes articles, somebody who goes off and learns new bits of code or software, somebody who just has an interesting side project, anything that shows an indication that they do their job but it's something that they enjoy and they love and they’re invested in. That's the only real thread for me.

I think design by it's definition involves a lot of personal, emotional and intellectual investment from the designer. If you don't really care about it, then it looks like a design created by someone who doesn't care.

Kristie: Did you scale your design teams with a set plan and structure in place? Or, was it an organic growth plan?

Martyn: I've done both. In my last job, it happened in fits and starts. There would be a rocket under us for some structural change, then other times it would slowly develop depending on what the needs were.

At Virgin, I don't think they were sure what I was going to do when I first arrived, they thought there were two or three empty roles and they just said, well, you can fill those with designers if you want. And now, there's over 20 of us.

It was a situation whereby I said, ‘Okay, well, here's the current situation’, and then highlighted the issues and opportunities for it to be better. It would mean a rebalance of investment. I said, ‘Well, you're spending this much getting this stuff done. You let me hire these people, you'll spend a fraction of that and we'll get more done.’

I put together a business case for increasing headcount. So, nothing has been organic, it's been very much a concerted effort which I've taken hold of. It often comes down to knowing what are the levers that you can pull to get the right reaction in a business. Lots of businesses will resist increasing headcount for obvious reasons. Right now, no organisation wants to increase overheads without signs that the bottom line will benefit from it.

I've never felt comfortable with anything just going ‘bang’, either product launches or all changes, I think 'incrementally' is how I naturally operate. I was keen to take a small thing, prove it on a small scale and say, ‘Okay, well, if you give me X more, then I will achieve results that are even higher than what we saw.’

When I put it in those terms, I abandoned all my sensibilities around talking about quality and culture. All that kind of stuff is important in building a design team but for proposing changes, you come down to saying, ‘I'm going to reduce your spend by this much, I'm going to increase your metrics by this much, I'm going to improve team engagement by this much’

I had to nail my colours to the cross as it were and say, ‘This is what I'm going to give you if you give me this, this is why I'm going to achieve it and if I don't, then you can pin me off.’

Kristie: What are some of the top challenges you have faced as a Design Leader?

Martyn: Learning to talk business, to listen and respond appropriately to an organisation.

I found that I made this mistake lots of times, if I go in and start talking about lean UX, design sprints and design systems to a sales team, they're probably just going to shrug their shoulders and say, who cares, right?

Whereas if I find a way of taking the things that I want to achieve within the design process, the team and set up, then frame it in a way that is going to work the sales team, for instance, ‘I'm going to be able to increase retention rates and lower your cost of sale', then they're happy.

Learning to frame it and talk less about design and more about outcomes, maybe shifting the conversation away from outputs. That’s been quite a tough and complicated lesson.

I would say the other side of it is pure leadership, knowing what type of leader or leadership is necessary at each time. I've that I found very difficult and something that I've had to learn a lot about because I think there's lots of different types of leaders. There’s the wartime leader who's there to make cuts and make very tough decisions, battle through tricky situations. There are growth leaders who are just going to expand everything up and scale everything. There are leaders who need to inspire new directions and there are leaders who just need to get right into the details, knowing what's needed at any one time and completely adapting leadership style to suit what's necessary.

Kristie: Going from agency to in house, did you find a significant change to your leadership style/approach?

Martyn: Leadership is not unlike design, in that your style, approach and your skillsets develop.

The more you do it and the more different situations that you design for, you hone certain design chops and then in leadership there's certain things that you develop equally.

Moving from agency to in-house, I mean, it's just a whole different game and there's almost nothing transferrable. I found with agencies, it felt like it was up to me to be that inspirational leader continually going out into the world, finding out what's new and interesting, bringing it back and creating a new spin on it. It was like continually being a cultural sponge and generating ideas, encouraging other people to generate ideas and inspiring all the way.

In-house was very much a case of learning how to focus and be conscious of the bigger picture, knowing that you didn't have to do it in three months or in two weeks, but actually, the things that you were doing now may just set people up for next year. The more foundational strategic approach, knowing when to push back a project and say, ‘this isn't going get us to where we need to go' and getting everybody aligned. I found it to be a whole different game, which is why I moved because it was completely new and completely terrifying. It felt like this whole new area of my skill set and experience.

Kristie: Was it hard, going from agency to inhouse and being the only designer? Did you find it hard to be the only ‘design voice’?

Martyn: Yes, imagine that, right?! Over 80,000 people worldwide, and not to say there wasn't fantastic leadership at RSA at the time, but initially not from a design background.

As we grew, it came along. Then I was no longer the only voice in the company and you have to set aside your ego very quickly.

I'd gone from leading pitches, running a studio and setting out these design strategies to getting back in the saddle. Moving pixels around, sitting down with developers and talking to them about how I wanted it to work and operate, and I’d have to do sketches. As the team slowly built up, then I could step back.

Kristie: How did you find being the first designer, or were you brought on to scale the team?

Martyn: I liked the idea of being in on the ground floor. It's something that grows and moves. I like the idea of joining before anyone else wanted to join and to scale with something.

It certainly did that as we went from one, and then it was quickly three, and then it was up to around ninety. When you're in at the ground floor, you can influence things in a deep-rooted foundational way.

That was the plan, and that was the exciting part.

Kristie: How did you effectively implement global design processes and ways of working?

Martyn: It was a really interesting time, I spent a lot of time in airports. There was no unified approach or philosophy around it at the time, and there was no unified level of maturity within the organization's.

For us to arrive with our suitcases and our English accents, got a few different responses, from ‘Fantastic we're glad you're here, there's so much for you to do.' To the other end of the spectrum, ‘We've got a design team, thank you very much. We don't need you.’

In every single instance I started with ‘What can I do to help?’, and in some instances it was very much a case of, ‘Here's a whole bunch of stuff that we have already done and learnt' to almost prove we could be of value to these organisations.

All of that boils down to the very simple matter of winning people’s trust. If they start to trust you, they can start to see that you’re just there to help and genuinely find a way to make their job easier and make them more successful.

I’m never really comfortable with a combative approach, so if you march in there and say, ‘Okay, this is how it’s going to be from now on folks, what you did before doesn’t matter.' I don’t buy in to that way of working. I don’t think it creates sustainable long-term teams.

It may get you short term results. You might just hit a metric and get a thing done. Then it’s all high fives and then everyone’s really cross, they go back to what they needed to do, and it doesn’t bring about change. I think it just affects an immediate response.

Kristie: Do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

Martyn: I have a belief that you can tie back to connections and the idea of connections. I have a Charles Eames quote which I keep by me,

“Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects...the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se”

That really stuck with me. Then when I think about all the times design has been done well, it's been about connecting a number of different ideas.

With a new product, it's just a few different things that have come together in a unique way. Maybe it's about connecting people to a brand in a way that has never been done before.

Ultimately, it's about connecting people to one another. I don't know if it's a design philosophy, that I can boil down to a nice repeatable quote, but for me, I think design always comes down to connections and the quality of connections.

In large organisations, you can find brilliant people doing brilliant things, but they're just not connecting to one another. There's lots of times where I've gone and put people together in a room and brilliant things happen. So, whether it's connecting people in organisations, or it's connecting separate ideas, or it's connecting one person to another or connecting to your brand message. I think it boils down to that.

Kristie: Blogs, books or podcasts, are there any resources that are either helping you now have helped you in the past? Or any design teams that inspired you?

Martyn: I'm still super hungry for learning about design. I was from the start of that career day when I was 13. I consume an awful lot. I still geek out on it, I never get tired of it.

In terms of books, Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee is a phenomenal book about anyone who's designing any kind of experiences or products or brands should take a moment to read that because it it's so rich with ideas about the tiniest details that can accumulate a huge effect, I think that's really fantastic.

Anyone who's working in tech should have read Calm Technology by Amber Case. There's so much important stuff in there. It relates a lot to the things worked on by Mark Weiser and the team at Xerox PARC. It’s even more important today than it ever was

Design To Grow by David Butler, which is the story of how the design teams Coca Cola scaled. If you work in a big organisation, and you're trying to get the organisation to appreciate and value and understand design, read that book and just repeat it word for word because it's genius.

In terms of leadership and design leadership particularly, there's a really great book that was recommended to me on a Slack channel called The Five Dysfunctions Of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.

It's not what you think it's going to be, that book completely blindsided me. When I got it through the post it went to the bottom of the pile a few times, then I started it and it was brilliant. Anyone who's been in a team and anyone in any kind of leadership role should just read the first couple of chapters, you won’t be able to put it down, I read it in a few days. I recommend it to anyone that I mentor or talk to.

Podcasts… I love listening to Intercom On Product because I think the stuff that goes on in intercom is very interesting and forward thinking but it's also just two guys who are obviously friends, who know each other very well. I just like listening to them chat.

I get really jealous and fixated on design teams and I want to emulate them.

I use Spotify everyday and I’m constantly falling in love with their product design. Over the years I think they not only contribute positively to the design community but also manage to maintain exceptionally high standards.

The Google Method podcast and the Google design team, both here in the UK and over in California, have just been phenomenal and the more you learn about them, and the people in processes inside those teams, the more you can understand why it's so successful. Their melding, of hardware and software design is something to be really taken note of, I think it's very interesting.

Thanks Martyn!

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. David Stevens, Design Ops Director

By Kristie Craft

Within this series, Kristie sits down with Design Leaders to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to David Stevens, Design Ops Director at HSBC Commercial Bank.

Kristie: Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into design?

David: I've been in the design and research game now for about 15 years. Growing up, I was surrounded by creativity and I always wanted to work for Apple, as did most young designers at the time - so I trained as a product designer at University of Sussex.

What I didn't realise at the time was that product design was a lot of Mechanical Engineering, a lot of electrical engineering, a lot of material science, and I wasn't very good at math.

I found a course teacher, who was seconded from the Royal College of Art, who taught me about the value of ethnographic research. They had a real passion for making things better for people who struggled in life generally. Particularly older people with arthritis and other chronic pain conditions.

Combining the passion for inclusive design and this newfound love of research, going out and watching people in the world, understanding their struggles and prototyping things at pace, and really understanding what works and what didn't was where it all started.

Since then I’ve worked as a practitioner and leader in design agencies and in-house teams, primarily in financial services and government

Kristie: How did you transition into a leadership / management role? Was it natural or were you guided into it from your manager at the time?

David: I've always been really competitive with myself, not with other people. I've always wanted to try and achieve as much as I can, as early as possible.

My manager at my first job really instilled into me the value of 'You will get far if you're really good at your craft, and you're really good with people'.

She taught me how to really hone a lot of those skills to the point where I got annoyed when more experienced people weren't delivering the same quality of work that I was expected to at a more junior level. I knew I could take on additional responsibilities, like managing stakeholders, costing up jobs and all the rest of it. This gradually led on to leading more teams and coaching. I was lucky to be put on some training, the Dale Carnegie Skills for Success courses, which (whilst extremely cringeworthy at times) gave me the foundations to manage and lead with passion and empathy

When it comes to my approach to leadership, it's definitely not telling people the answer. It's trying to help them find the answer for themselves and trying to find ways to provide them with the resources, expertise and the coaching that they might need to find their own way of doing something, rather than it always being my way.

Kristie: What is your current role?

David: My current role is Design Ops Director for HSBC Commercial Bank in the Customer Experience team. Whilst we’re one of our focuses is clearly on delivering great outcomes for customers.

From a design operations perspective, I'm responsible for everything that our designers do that isn't design; broadly speaking that includes the ecosystems, processes and culture that makes design work.

On a practical level, this includes:

• making sure the team has the right tools for the job

• ensuring we work as effectively and efficiently as possible

• streamlining how we work with other delivery teams

• building and nurturing service design and research communities of practice

• communicating and living the values

I'm also responsible for training; which includes developing and delivering design thinking and service design training across the bank. This not only helps create a career path for our service designers, but is also a critical part of upskilling the organisation in some of the basics around design thinking and creative problem solving.

Lastly, I'm responsible for service design governance. We're really looking to improve the experience we offer customers, firstly to ensure we get the basics absolutely right, but also in the market and growing as customers grow their business through the services that we offer.

Kristie: Just on that, is service design new to HSBC?

David: Yes, the retail bank is a little further ahead of its design maturity, because they’ve been the first part of the bank to respond to the (much needed) challenge from fintechs.

However, we’re now seeing a huge shift in commercial banking customer expectations too, and I feel extremely lucky to be part of a business investing in building this kind of capability.

When I joined last year, Kara Richards, our Global Head of Customer Experience for the Commercial Bank, spoke to me about the need to really ‘move the needle’ on the customer experience in the bank. The way we wanted to achieve that was by building a world-class service design and research team that helped the bank create valuable and proven solutions, both for customers and the business

Service design was brand new to the bank and a lot of the education we’ve worked on is to ensure it’s clear what service design and design research are, how they differ from other disciplines and the value these skills adds to both what we deliver to customers and the way we do it.

Kristie: And was that difficult, or did you have the right level or buy-in?

David: We've had such senior level buy–in and sponsorship, right from the top of the Group, so we’ve been extremely lucky to be able to grow a team from scratch in such short timelines. This meant that last year we grew from 5 people to over 50 in less than 6 months, which included permanent hires, contractors and a few seconded agency partners to help us get key projects over the line.

The hard bit wasn’t the buy-in per se, but getting the foundations right for this rapidly scaling team to be as impactful as possible from the get-go.

Kristie: I know you've covered some of it, but as Design Ops is new, how do you explain Design Ops to others?

David: I've led practice teams and I've been a practitioner in research and service design strategy, but the reason that I find Design Ops so interesting and compelling, is that it's one of the few roles that exist to really make design work in a large organisation.

To be able to set the infrastructure up so that from the moment people join, you're able to give them the tools, the processes, the workflows that makes their life easier in a much larger organisation.

When we started out, we definitely didn’t get it right first time! We had people waiting weeks for a laptop and email addresses because we were new as well and didn’t have a clear sight of all the processes required in a large place like HSBC. But we learned and adapted and things are much smoother now.

The reason this matters to me, as a designer, is that I’ve joined in-house teams having left agencies and it can be an incredibly painful experience simply getting the tools to do your best work due to the amount of red tape.

In order for design to be successful and taken seriously as a force for change in large corporates, we need the infrastructure for designers to be successful; so I see my role and purpose to serve the needs of the design community, to enable them to do their best work, to elevate the role we play in delivering solutions that really work and ultimately to create a happy culture.

Kristie: What are some of the top challenges you've faced as a design leader?

David: One of the hardest things to do is to communicate the real business value of good research

There's not necessarily the organisational ritual or habit for conducting research with customers regularly and often, and that's for a number of reasons. It's very difficult to find someone who owns the research relationship, there's lots of different teams doing little bits of research. So we're trying to find a way to really centralise that at the moment, in one way or another, and that's why we have a Research Ops team.

Part of the challenge is helping communicate that if you spend this money now, you're going to reduce your risk much later. By doing this research with very highly skilled people, you’re much more likely to get great results rather than going out there and getting your team to ask questions yourselves. Not everyone can do good research and it just becomes a waste of money. That said, when your resources are stretched, those skilled practitioners play an incredibly important coaching role, so that we build capability in the business and enable teams to do some elements of research themselves.

Part of what I'm really passionate about is making sure that we don't dilute the value of research practitioners in the context of much wider design and change. The skills that they have, such as adductive thinking and the ability to sift through lots of information and converge to the important information that they've heard from customers and colleagues, help distil the data and information down into the compelling insights that make a difference to what we design.

There's also the challenge of how to talk about service design in a way that means something tangible to a business. What you talk about is end to end, front to back design of services, but a service designer won't be the only one that can do that. Process engineers do this as well, we just have a slightly different way of looking at it.

Trying to find those moments of collaboration without stepping on toes is always a little awkward – thankfully due to the sheer scale of the challenges we face, I’ve found that the organisational politics isn’t much of an issue at HSBC - everyone is genuinely willing to work with each other. So, we've got a good thing...

Kristie: How have you found adapting to the new ways of working during COVID 19?

David: We've found it remarkably straightforward. Not without hiccups, but it's been much easier than I expected to transition to working from home environment, in terms of the project work that we're trying to get out of it, and that's largely because we're a global organisation.

We're in 79 different jurisdictions and need to collaborate with global teams regularly We made a big transition to Zoom just before COVID hit properly, so that's been an absolute game changer and given us the ability to use breakout rooms and run amazing engaging workshops at amazing pace. Doing this remotely has been a huge win for our team because we're pioneering this way of working and it’s actually accelerating some of the changes we were hoping to influence.

The more difficult thing has been an element of loneliness, I think, and trying to find the time in between the back to back half-hour phone calls and zoom meetings to try and find that time for wellbeing -for actually connecting with the team on a more personal level and take even the five minutes that you would normally have walking in between corridors. We’ve now set up remote breakfast drop-ins, happy hours with leadership where we share a Quarantini or two, ‘walkshops’ instead of workshops and ensure we share as many hints and tips for wellbeing as we can.

On a personal level, my wife has become a full-time parent to our two-year-old. It has been a more challenging transition, just to help find the time in the day and make sure that I'm still present having lunch and dinner together, going out for walks, trying to create some boundaries between my work and home life.

Kristie: Do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

David: If you design something for the extremes of people's needs, it will be better for everyone. So really making sure that we do things as inclusively as possible, whether that's internal teams, or if it's for customers.

One place where this really became clear, was when I was at the home office, where we were designing a service for internal users for immigration officers. Because of the pace we had to deliver, and because it was ‘internally’ facing, some people on the team were adamant we didn’t have to go through the GDS service assessment. However, when you look at the needs internal users had it couldn’t be ignored – it wasn’t just the right thing to do, it was also essential for legally meeting the obligations the government has to meet the needs of its employees.

So taking that experience into my role now and the types of people that I look to hire as well, I definitely look to hire people who look at things from that perspective – people who don’t just design for 80% of the audience. I want people who know how to design for 100%.

Kristie: When scaling the HSBC team, what are the important qualities or skills you look for in a Designer?

David: We started off with people that are not only talented great service designers, but people who have a real resilient quality about them,

I also really wanted to look for people with a diverse background. Lots of people with financial service experience are particularly useful for subject matter expertise, but other types of regulated environments that people have worked in, as well. People I know who've worked in government, people I know who've worked in really complicated regulatory environments in the insurance industry, or in health care, for example, and much faster moving organisations like Amazon, as the organisational knowledge of places like that helped us modernise quickly.

In terms of the qualities themselves, you have to be resilient, extremely analytical, but pragmatic as well as we’re in tough times and have to focus on delivering what customers and colleagues need as quickly as possible.

You also need people who are willing to connect and navigate throughout the organisation. We have a very complex organisational structure, it’s hard to figure out who reports into who, what their reporting lines are, who's responsible for what, is it just regional or global, who has the influence, and so having the ability to network through the organisation is also really important. You need to be a real people person and understand how to create long-lasting relationships.

You also need to understand the commercial realities of in house teams. Unlike agencies, you can't just hire more freelancers to get a project done. That doesn't exist in the bank. You have to deal with the resources that you've got and figure out what impact you're going to have and what projects are going to deliver something of real value, provide growth opportunities for the team and demonstrate impact

Kristie: What do you think makes a good work culture?

David: We've been having this discussion quite a bit recently and for us culture is ‘how we do things here.’ It's a mixture of behaviours, beliefs, values and actions that are instilled in a team.

I think you'll get a lot of people who join a team and try and wonder how they fit in. What we've tried to do is make sure that we've got a culture that is very transparent in terms of what we believe and what we do. We make sure that we're working in teams, rather than being lone wolves, for example, that we try and choose hero projects, instead of spreading ourselves across absolutely everything. When it comes down to the projects that we're working on, we try to empower them to build their own micro-cultures. So having the tools to run a workshop to get to know the project team and stakeholders better, the workshop, even if it's just workshop templates and facilitators to kick start a project and to help people get to know each other before they get going.

We’ve also used the 16 personalities test, it's basically a high-level psychometric test that tells you what personality type you are. That really helps to understand the neurodiversity of the team. It’s actually helped us understand that we’re over-indexed in a particular type of personality – whilst that’s to be expected to some extent (as we’re all designers), it’s also given us clues to areas that we could benefit from different styles of thinking.

For me culture is the ways that we work, the support that we provide each other, the way that we provide feedback, the way that we call out the bad behaviours, and, and the way that we continue to nurture a culture of progression, continuous feedback, iteration, and ultimately supporting each other, especially in times like this.

Kristie: What's one thing about design that's clear to you, but don't think is so clear to other people?

David: Everyone has the skills to solve problems creatively and that design is never surface level.

Being able to coach people through the importance of thinking creatively and using design thinking techniques, as an example, to understand people's behaviour or empathise with an audience, to be able to explore things from different angles, and use it as a tool for just doing their job better – whether that launching greater products or services, or creating a presentation for their boss, or to answer a difficult question for a group of customers on the front line.

To summarise, everyone has the ability to think like a designer, even if they don't have the craft.

Kristie: Last question: Blogs, books and podcasts, what can you recommend?

David: Good services by Lou Downe, a great introduction to talking about service design in a really practical context and the things that good services do. The reason that's good for leaders is because we've often talked about service design and the importance of a method for many, many years, but very few people get into ‘this is just what a good service looks like’, or ‘what it should do’, both from how it supports the customer, but also how it supports the business.

Making Of A Manager by Julie Zhuo, it’s awesome. I've made so many mistakes as a leader over time and so has Julie, by her own admission. Hearing her on the Julie Zhuo: Learning to manage like a leader - DesignBetter is great. And because she was just like, I have no idea how to be a manager first time around, these are some great life lessons and some tips on how to do things.

One of the really practical things I've taken from that book is with direct reports, making sure you have at least weekly check ins with them, because without doing that you don't have enough contact time. I think that's really important.

Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz, Kristin Skinner. That takes a lot of lessons from the Adaptive Path acquisition by Capital One and looks at how you integrate your design teams into delivery and the different models that work in house teams.

Design Better podcasts, it's one of my favourites, they have some great speakers on there. They've also got a tonne of great handbooks co-authored by lots of different people. For instance their Design Thinking Handbook, the DesignOps Handbook and their most recent one around remote work has a huge amount of valuable information.

The Crazy One podcast by Stephen Gates.

I'd also recommend following Ross Breadmore from Lloyds Banking Group, he’s a design director and he often does some great week notes and medium articles about building and measuring capabilities in a growing service design in particular.

Let My people Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard. The CEO of Patagonia, and it’s their lessons in culture. It’s a great one.

Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella. A great lesson in how to completely reshape what was quite a toxic, competitive sales driven culture, into something that serves the needs of customers, both at an enterprise level but also wider society. So that's been really inspiring.

Thanks David!

Inside The Mind of Design Leaders Ft. Lily Dart, Experience Director

By Kristie Craft

Within this series, Kristie sits down with Design Leaders to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Lily Dart, Experience Designer at FutureGov.

Kristie: Could you tell us a bit about yourself, your design journey and your current role?

Lily: It all started when I was 13. I’m disabled and I had particularly ill health when I was a teenager. When I was stuck at home, I taught myself how to code. I wanted to do something creative. I wasn't great with paint and pencils, so I ended up using Photoshop to create some digital art. Once I had the digital art, I wanted to display it somewhere. So I started to learn how to code enough to create basic web pages. I did that for a few years, then decided that I wanted to go to university to study graphic design.

I studied Graphic Communications at LCC then spent a few years freelancing. My first freelance project was at 16. I designed and built an exceedingly poor website for my secondary school, and carried on freelancing from there. I rediscovered my love for code and UI design when I was working in context with real clients and real problems.

I freelanced working with charities and public sector bodies then worked with the central government at a company called DXW. I spent three years there and that was my first proper leadership role.

We grew a team from 5 to about 23 people. I got a real interest in how to grow happy high-performing teams. It was the first time I had scaled a team and I was interested in repeating that process and learning more about it.

I worked as a Design Director at the Department for International Trade. That was a huge scaling activity. I started with 1 team member and within six months I had 50 team members. By the time I left in just under two years, we had gone from 35 people to 140 overall.

As part of the leadership team, I went from leading multiple products to looking at how best to manage the overall digital team. I was responsible for operational processes, training and development. I also managed every “Head of” (design, content, tech) and we worked on quality control for each specialism. I was operating a huge scale, with rapidly increasing team size. I was responsible for both making sure the team had a good experience, but that we also produced quality work for our users.

I then went to Lloyds Banking Group for two years. I built a team to design, build and roll out their design system. It was the first design system Lloyds ever had. When I joined, people didn’t really believe it was possible. There are about 10,000 designers and developers at Lloyds. People genuinely didn’t believe we would be able to get them to align onto a single system, or that the tech would support it. It was an exciting journey.

Two months ago I joined FutureGov. I returned to the public sector in part because I found that it's harder for people in the private sector to understand the type of design I do.

There is less service design and organisational design in the private sector. My portfolio isn’t visual anymore; its case studies cost savings and organisational benefits. It describes service design work on digital and non-digital touchpoints. And how I have successfully built and scaled teams. Many people I spoke to in the private sector didn't understand that all of that activity is design. They often wanted visual or interaction design, shiny apps with good conversion rates.

The business that did understand the scope of my work, and was keen to have my experience, was FutureGov. Plus, I’d wanted to work with them for quite a long time, so I was really excited to get the offer.

At FutureGov, I'm responsible for the client and employee experience. I’m also a deputy to the Chief Design Officer. My role here is about making sure that the team is set up for success in order to scale. They have scaled up quite quickly over the last couple of years, and are already known for incredibly high-quality work in the public sector. We want to make sure that quality work continues as we add more and more people to the organisation.

At the moment I’m looking at how we are representing and repeating our vision and purpose in everything that we do. That’s one part of how we make sure that the team is aligned to that purpose and goal and that, for that goal, they understand what good looks like. I’m also helping to ensure the vision and purpose provides value to our clients and helps them to achieve outcomes for their users.

Kristie: With most of your more recent roles, you’ve been brought on to scale teams or systems. On that, how have you effectively scaled your team whilst successfully maintaining the team culture? And how important is it to build a diverse team?

Lily: I think to maintain or increase quality in a team’s delivery, diversity is of critical importance. Diversity can help us to hear and understand other voices, and to better understand the needs of our users. Monoculture teams can lead to no challenges being raised or misinterpreting the needs of their users. Healthy differences of opinion push us to create better products and services.

In the organisations where diversity is prioritised, it’s often about the ratio of men to women. There are lots of kinds of diversity that many organisations are not really focusing on. It’s less common to have targets for how many BAME, LGBT or disabled people you want in your organisation.

This is a problem that FutureGov is really engaged with, which I love. We have more than 50% of women in the organisation, which is quite rare for a tech and design organisation. We also have a high proportion of LGBT people and some very visible senior leaders (including myself) who have disabilities. We are also actively working on how we can improve the number of team members who are BAME and those who come from lower-income backgrounds.

I think successfully creating a diverse team is about the culture of the organisation. You have to actively change and evolve your culture in order to make it welcoming for other people. That’s the place that people fall down, it’s been the reason that I have moved on from organisations in the past. You have to compromise. Whether by creating space for people from minoritized groups on the leadership team, or changing your pay structures or in your everyday language. Many leaders ultimately don't want to make that compromise to create a culture they feel isn't totally designed around their own needs.

Maintaining culture when scaling a team can be difficult. Culture can become a side effect of who is in the team rather than something we thoughtfully create. One way to reduce that risk is to give your team tools to help them make decisions, to measure success or to give feedback to each other. Vision statements, principles and defined behaviours are common examples.

For me, getting those kinds of tools in place and repeating those messages consistently is the key to scaling team culture successfully.

Kristie: What are some of the top challenges you’ve faced as a Designer and in more recent years, a Design Leader?

Lily: The biggest one that I faced personally was early on in my career. As a first time manager, I absorbed everybody's problems and made them personal to me.

I had a breakdown a couple of years ago and ended up taking four months off work. I was deeply invested in everyone in my team, and unhappy when they were unhappy. I felt like it was my duty to move the earth to try to make them happier.

But as a single manager in an organisation, there are always going to be things outside of your control. When I couldn't make those things change to make them happier, I got very frustrated. My stress levels increased and combined with some serious events in my personal life, and I burned out.

I was in therapy while I was recovering. My therapist told me that her job was to sit and listen to people's problems all day. As a therapist, she is required to have her own therapist. This is so that she has someone to support her, and to stop her from absorbing other people's problems. She said I was doing all of the work of the therapist without any of that support in place.

That comment really helped me to think about where my boundaries were in terms of work and my team. To help me structure and set better boundaries for myself so that I didn't become overwhelmed.

I see this same pattern commonly with lots of new managers, particularly with women or people from minoritized groups. We tend to be a little bit more attuned into what is going on emotionally. Partly because we're at risk. If someone gets angry or upset with us, as a minoritized group that can often mean the impact could be more severe than it is for other people.

Learning how to set boundaries is not something we're taught by anyone. It's really critical for us to succeed and allows us to carry on working while having happy personal lives. In reality, we're taught that we should do what our employer tells us to do. That we should work whatever hours that we need to do to succeed. Actually the success is often about setting boundaries and having a healthy balance between work and our personal lives.

My biggest problem with the organisations I’ve worked in has usually been about lack of clarity.

If the organisation isn't clear on what it's trying to achieve, it often creates conflict. We need to give our teams direction for them to be successful. If things are shifting and changing in the management teams above us, it can be difficult to give that direction in a meaningful way.

You can add a lot of value by just creating certainty in the team without addressing the wider organisation's direction. But there is only so far you can go before the team needs to be working at the same pace as the organisation.

That said, I’ve seen many leaders in this situation just sit still and wait for clarity to come to them. I'd love to see more leaders proactively trying to define clarity for their teams, even when the management layers above are struggling.

Kristie: How do you keep your team aligned with your vision? Is it a challenge?

Lily: Keeping people working to a vision is not so much of a challenge, but it is very hard work. And the level of work required is underestimated.

You have to find the right mechanisms to use to deploy the vision into the team. Things like design principles, progression frameworks and yearly reviews are all opportunities to repeat the vision.

These everyday tools are places where you can reinforce your vision. For example, explaining how you can show your alignment with the vision to progress through the company. But you have to keep repeating yourself, over and over. And you have to do the hard work to make it simple for the team to understand.

This is often one of the points where organisations fall down, particularly when scaling. They believe that progress towards vision should somehow sustain itself. And often it does for small teams. It’s easier with small teams because the work is small, and as a leader, you can see and direct all of it. For larger teams, you can’t just put out a single vision statement and expect people to agree with it or even understand it. All alignment, ultimately, is hard work that needs time and investment.

Kristie: What are some of the principals that you’ve been taught in your previous roles that you continue to use and teach?

Lily: The first one is about enabling the team. I've seen lots of junior design leaders go from being very hands-on, to not having the time to be hands-on as a leader. The first instinct when going into a leadership role is to try to continue to be hands-on. We feel like we’re in charge, and being in the detail is what keeps the team producing quality work.

That doesn't scale - individual humans don't scale - and there's only so much you can do in a day. You have to discover the tools and mechanisms that allow the team to solve problems for you.

For example, I was quite resistant to written briefs when I was a junior leader. My brain doesn't absorb information that way, so I assumed it wouldn’t for others. That meant that the team found it difficult to understand what I wanted. I've had to learn that not everyone operates that way, and people can't psychically see what's in my brain. The team needed something that they could access and absorb easily at their own pace, in order to understand what problem to solve.

There's a lot of content design in successful leadership. Being able to distil your message into something that's understandable.

There's also a lot of user research. I do a lot of writing stuff down and testing it with a team. I get their feedback, iterate it, help them to feel like they've been brought into the process of it being created. But also making sure that they do actually understand the information in the way that I intended it. Using that iterative, user-centred approach to manage a team.

I see a lot of designers who know how to do that with users. We know how to communicate, how to think about what user needs are. But we often don’t use those skills when it comes to our own teams. We don't think ‘Can I put myself in the shoes of that person for a minute?’. ‘Can I do some test and learn with people?’. Or ‘what are the ways that I could capture user needs or do an internal research activity?’. You can replicate all those tools successfully to create better spaces for people to work in.

Another principle would be to steal from other specialisms. Rather than relearning things from scratch that other industries or other specialisms already know. There is a bit of a default in design where we try to design our own processes from scratch. Design is different, and it's creative. We want to think about things in a different way. But hundreds, if not thousands, of people, have solved these problems before. I try to steal first, and then create new things if necessary later.

The last thing is just about how I create sustainable change. Sometimes, when you're trying to create change in the way your team delivers, you feel like you have to add a new process or responsibility to your team members. I’ve had a lot more success in not creating a new process. Instead, I try to connect the new goals or actions I want to happen with existing processes.

Your team has a lot to think about, and already has full-time jobs. The more you load onto them, the less you’ll get done. Adding new things just doesn’t scale over time, unless you have the money for a giant team.

One example of where I am doing this at Futuregov is to connect knowledge management responsibilities to our Communities of Practices. People already get together in the communities to talk about how we deliver various practices in the business. By asking that they also document the outputs for reuse, it’s not adding much additional time. The more common route is to ask every individual team member to do their own knowledge management, and usually, this fails.

Kristie: Blogs, books and podcasts. Are there any resources that are helping you now or that have helped you in the past?

Lily: I have to admit, I'm not reading or listening to anything at the moment. I think in this current coronavirus context I'm just trying to focus on the simple things. I'm sure you've seen the threads going around – ‘If you haven't come out of the lockdown with another skill than you haven't tried hard enough’ - and I just fundamentally hate that. I'm just focusing on keeping healthy and functioning right now.

For new leaders, there's an InVision podcast on Design Leadership that’s really worth listening to. Lots of different and interesting experiences from other design leaders explaining how they do things.

More broadly, I find Twitter to be an amazing source of knowledge and insight, but it has to be actively curated.

When people ask me about the first steps to understanding what the needs for minoritized groups are, I always say start with Twitter. Make sure that you are following BAME, disabled and LGBT people, particularly trans folk. By listening, you can start to understand the context that they live in and the day to day experiences they have.

Make sure you have a diverse group of people you're following. Most importantly - make sure you are listening to them and not responding. Lots of people see posts from minoritized groups that they feel are directed negatively at them and have an urge to defend themselves.

That discomforting feeling is your privilege. Learning about how it surfaces inside you is a small part towards being more inclusive, and more able to support minoritized groups. But you have to address that feeling internally, not by battling it out with people on the internet.

I'm gay, disabled, a woman working in tech. I still have those moments where I look at stuff and I'm like, ‘Oh, that feels like it's directed at me’ and feel upset and angry. But you can teach yourself to not respond. To sit with those feelings for a bit and process them through. To not take that feeling to the person who is sharing, very kindly, their experience with you. And probably getting a lot of backlash on the internet for it already.

It’s also important to be mindful that you're absorbing those experiences from real people. They are providing value and service to you. They have rent to pay, and food to buy. In many cases, you can donate to them or contribute to a cause on their behalf. Where you can pay for the value you receive.

Kristie: In the current global situation with COVID-19, is there any advice you can give to other leaders that might be in the same position as yourself with starting a new position remotely, and how do you effectively manage people you haven’t met yet?

Lily: We have an awesome People/HR team at FutureGov and I've been working with them to pack out some of the advice we're giving managers in this situation. Partially from my own mental health experiences.

One of the big things I would flag to leaders in this situation is that there is a high risk of people burning out. Professional burnout is a real medical condition and the World Health Organisation recognises it. Burnout can happen when we've got lots of emotional things going on and are under a heavy workload. It can take years to recover and sometimes people don't entirely recover from it.

Not everyone will have the emotional tools in this situation to be able to work through the feelings this brings up. Being mindful of what the symptoms of burnout are and looking out for any changes of behaviour in your team is important. As is making sure that you're proactively suggesting that they take time off. Even though we're at home and it feels like we're resting more, we're not really, because we're living through a national crisis.

We have a duty of care to people in our team. Both to look after ourselves, but also to make sure that we're not pressuring them to keep on working if they are having a difficult time.

We've got people who are caring for kids or family members, as well as doing full-time jobs. Everyone's routine has been tipped on its head, and there's a lot going on. Not everyone will be able to identify what is causing them problems, and not everyone has the tools to be able to ask for the boundaries or the time they need to deal with them.

Thanks Lily.

Inside The mind of Design Leaders Ft. Bryn Ray, Design Executive Consultant at American Express

By Kristie Craft

Within this series, Kristie sits down with Design Leaders to get their insight into their successes, challenges and advice. This week, Kristie speaks to Bryn Ray, Executive Consultant of Design at American Express.

Could you tell me a bit about yourself, your current role and the company you work for?

“I came from a very traditional information architecture background and worked my way into User Experience.

This was from 2008 to 2010, I was finishing up education and working on academic record systems and Library Management Tools. Platforms that are hardcore information architecture, but digital.

Then I studied architecture, which is where I refined creative and design process and got a bit obsessed with things like city planning and governance, the idea of how you put restrictions and structure around creativity to make sure that something works.

I freelanced my way through university, becoming more and more interested in user experience, and eventually went on to study an MSc in User Experience Design.

Pretty much, for the last 10 to 12 years, I've worked as an independent contractor. I’m currently at American Express leading a cool piece that basically connects all their products, services and all the different online platforms.”

In your current role as an IC, working across the business but not managing, are you seen as a design leader?

“So as an IC, I'm positioned as a counterpart between a couple of Design Directors and a Design VP, who all manage teams. They’re certainly the people leaders.

I'm responsible for helping them shape the strategy and help put the tools together that enable people to do their job. So, there's more practical doing and a lot of actual legwork in figuring things out.

Often, they'll take that work and pitch it, sell it, talk to senior leaders and then communicate that into their design team.”

Throughout your career, what are some of the top challenges that you've faced as a designer?

“I mean, the top was definitely the identity crisis that most designers have at some point. Grappling with the obsession of trying to put yourself in a box, and offering a specific service, rather than being someone who has an adaptable skillset that can be applied in many different ways.

I guess that's where the 'Design Thinking' movement has come from, it's more about solving a problem. Then PR is battling with the traditional perception of design, and where it’s placed in a business. It's often reduced to being thought of as graphic design was done by an external agency, which, you know, has value and its place, but it doesn't really encompass the world of design.

And the last is focusing on the skills that you want to develop and what parts of that you want to push. For a lot of people, myself included, you fall into doing work you don’t like because of the jobs you get offered, meaning you get better at something you don’t want to do.

The challenge is to try and keep aligned with the stuff that you like the most.

I spent a lot of years being very generalised across a spectrum of things, but in the last few years have really found a lot more success in turning down work that doesn't align with what I like, and actually becoming an expert at something.”

Coming back to your point on an identity crisis and finding your key offering as a leader, do you think you've found that?

“Yeah, a lot of our traditional design leaders are the people who manage the teams, have the broad understanding of the entire creative process and the different types of skills needed, often acquired by not focusing on something specific. However, it can be hugely beneficial because they can hire people into a wide range of disciplines.

But being an IC, it’s my opinion that you must be a heavyweight at something, you must bring a skill at a different level that enables people to do things they otherwise couldn’t.

For me, I really tried to isolate that 'thing' that made me excited to go to work. It doesn't necessarily have a name or brand, but it is leveraging things like system thinking to improve the way that you work across designers.

That's where I see my value as a leader, rather than being a traditional Design Leader.”

So your niche offering is system thinking?

“Yes, for American Express, they see it as complex information architecture. In other places, it’s been more about design systems.

The trend through all of it is about connecting all of the different parts of what's happening as a system and trying to put the right amount of guidance and structure in place to enable other people to do their job. So sometimes that comes down to an operating model and organisational design.”

Do you have a design philosophy that you live by?

“Nothing's original really… the primary one I always use is a quote by William Edward Denning, who said "A bad system will beat a good person every time." which has become highly apparent in my work.

The other is inspiration is drawn from my traditional architecture background. A favourite Architect of mine called Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who coined the phrase 'Less is more'. He was very much about functional beauty.

I also love philosophies introduced in manufacturing years gone past. They have so much to teach that can be applied to design. Of those through “locally” is the thing I always come back to – right place, right time. So, in summary, systems, simplicity, and locality. That’s my philosophical checklist.”

And so just on yourself being a practitioner, do you think it limits / could limit you from being a design leader?

“The first thing is, define the limit and define leader because they mean different things to everyone. In the traditional sense, yes, there is some limitations, particularly outside of design dreamland.

It's unrealistic to deny that for most companies becoming leaders for people, is about leading people. Unless you're in a very modern company - design doesn't go all the way to the top. At the same time, it doesn't mean to say that your sphere of influence can't be as big, if not bigger, by leading a “thing”.

My role now is essentially craft leadership, which is still a type of leadership, but because of HR flexibility (or lack of), traditional barriers and egos, internal versus external and getting budgets, you are often just a consultant. It's the only way they can really get you in there doing what you want to do, but even just the fact they're doing that is a vote of confidence.

Ultimately, the person who can lead a design or organisation system is probably not the same person who has a skill set of managing people. Making sure they're feeling safe in their job, working on their personal development etc…”

Great point and follows on to my next question, do you think the perspective of design leaders today across businesses is that design leaders are too far detached from the work? And is that problematic, or do you think it has to be that way?

“I think it's massively contextual. I think there are some cases where you don't need to be attached, but other (particularly in smaller companies) where you do need to be much more attached.

At the end of the day, I think you need to consider differentiation. There is a leadership of people and there is a leadership of craft and in some cases, the two may merge.

In a company like American Express as an example, the most senior person in design has never done design. They were in the business beforehand, but the reason for that is, the design was having reputational problems and had a PR issue. So, we needed someone who could look outwards from the team. They can do brand building education, they can empathise with people who didn't understand it, they know how the business works and they know what stakeholders want.

It was an immature digital organisation, they needed someone who was detached from what didn't matter. They had grown Design Directors who could manage the design work, who they trusted so were able to detach, but at the same time, it's very difficult for that person to stay on top of everything that's happening and to be able to act quickly.

I've also worked in companies where design goes all the way to the top, and yes, that person is still in the day to day - they will participate in design sprints, they will still come to critics and personally, I find that more healthy. The more senior you can have somebody who has ‘hands-on’ the better.

It's a traditional management question I guess, how many layers is too many layers?”

In your view, do you think there needs to be a C level design leader for the business to be more design led?

“In a corporate, you need senior sponsorship, that would be the long and short of it.

Currently we're getting a lot done, because we have a very senior person massively bought into what we’re doing, despite not having a design title. It'd be much easier if that person had a design title though.

The main thing is sponsorship. Annoyingly you assume you live in a perfect world, you do it the right way and think everybody gets it, but this is just not the case. A lot of companies are very bureaucratic, they're still hierarchical, and they will just do whatever they're told. So finding the space to think design first, finding the space to do things like paying down technical debt, for example, finding the space to go and do proper exploration work and have a strategy and a plan that you're going to work through, is tough.

People need to take time out delivering stuff right now, they need to stop focusing on features all the time, but they need somebody to give them the licence to do that. The only person who is going to grant the licence to do that is the person who signs off the budgets against the metrics, and the person who does that, is going to be very senior, so somebody needs to sponsor it.

Take Pinterest as an example, which was started by designers. They have fewer problems with this because the person right at the top of the company can empathise with the need to do that, the need to define what's right and do the exploration work upfront. They don't expect to see things instantly. You expect things to take time and you have to invest in that.”

And lastly, can you recommend any blogs, books, or podcasts that you've found helpful as a designer? Especially for those coming into the industry and that are looking for some guidance, whether that's on leadership or just in general?

“I do a lot of reading around the periphery of design. I think you need to do that in order to get the design process nailed.

For an IC particularly there's other things you need to consider, and a lot of that comes with understanding how other people work. We often just focus on design and we don't focus on how design interacts with other people. The surest way an IC can add value is to help people get things done, and that starts with understanding how they work.

The first recommendation is a book called Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.

Others would be The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project by Jean Kim, these are novels so they're fictional, but they're written about digital transformation. One of them focuses on DevOps, one of them focus on development, but the whole thing really helps demystify how things get done.

For audiobooks, there are two of the 'Great Courses', which are lectures that are put on Audible. One of them is on critical thinking and one of them is on complexity science.

Finally, a book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. It covers thinking about the different ways that we can make decisions with incomplete data. So as a designer, trying to think about when we should just design and put something out there, versus, when we should invest and research it, or how can we learn about something better, that's again the relationship bridge with your research counterparts and your data counterparts.”

Thanks Bryn.