February 5, 2023

The Path Forward: 3 Ways for Leaders to Shape Design’s Future In Business

Photo: Carrie Johnson

What got you here won’t get you there.

Standing on the precipice of a new future and looking toward the horizon, it’s clear the landscape has shifted. And will continue to evolve. Design leadership is change management — and it’s time to transform ourselves.

Design leaders in this new future can no longer focus on the desirability circle of the HCD Venn diagram and expect other disciplines to handle viability and feasibility completely. Our leaders and teams need to be multi-lingual — it’s time to lean in.

Companies need and want catalyst leadership, but there’s an apparent mismatch in expectations.

Here are three ways to shape design’s future in business and thrive as a leader:

1: Develop an integrated skillset and leverage technology.

Bring together new domain knowledge and emerging technology to become a powerhouse.

T-shaped leaders move beyond design disciplines in this environment. Business and technical acumen are required. Emerging technology is embraced and leveraged.

Designers need to understand the human insight and business aspects of the work, including leveraging data that drives business, data science, and AI/ML. Forward-leaning designers must learn to use AI-assisted tools to increase space for more strategic work.

Fuse the strategic design and business strategy toolkit. Envision experiences through service blueprints, develop approaches through future casting and opportunity framing, and map directly to ROI.

Make the future tangible through visualization, mapping, and prototyping.

2: Demonstrate business fluency and impact.

Show up as a business operator that’s driving sustainable growth.

Gain a deeper understanding of how the business works and how it makes money. Discover how value is created and what’s essential to the company. What are the most significant external and internal threats? What is the business strategy, and are you more focused on exploitation vs. exploration?

Focus on the metrics that move the business.

Don’t waste time developing a new set of metrics outside the business’s goal. Align on shared outcomes. Develop a shared vocabulary that grounds discussions in reality vs. theory.

Design leaders require business fluency and the ability to directly connect the work to the impact it’s creating for the business. Otherwise, they end up focusing most of their time down instead of across and up, lacking comfort in business conversations and accountability to metrics that move the needle.

Directly connect the work to the impact and ROI.

3: Architect a culture of system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration.

Become the orchestrator and organizational designer.

World-class organizations will move beyond the basics. Develop embedded capabilities and practices like service design, experience strategy, design technology, and experience architecture. This also requires hybrid leadership.

Define, hire, and develop talent along a spectrum from craft to strategy.

There’s a skillset distinction between shipping products, building platforms, and defining and mapping business systems and opportunities. The right talent and alignment are needed for strategic design, with accountability to deliver outcomes. Create integrated processes, mechanisms, and operating models leveraging cross-functional teams.

Strategy and organizational operating systems are connected.

Develop strong advanced product teams with portfolios aligned to the company’s strategic intent and clear accountability to budget and outcomes. Adapt your organization to what the company needs now while building the capability to create value for the future in adjacent markets.

Build a culture of hands-on experimentation through prototyping, modeling, testing, and iterating.

This is an exciting time where design leaders can shape the future of business if they are ready for it. It requires an integrated skillset, business fluency, and a culture of experimentation. The time is now.

August 21, 2022

Design Your Week: 3 Time Management Routines For Design Leaders That Keep Your Focus On Business Impact So You Can Drive Your Most Important Priorities 

Leading large Design organizations, I’ve realized one of the most important areas to gain leverage is through time management. I’ve prototyped many approaches to streamlining my days, maintaining focus, and getting results.

I’m going to share three routines that will provide leverage, allow you to scale, and drive impact for the business. I’m inspired to share these because I’ve used them myself, and reaped the benefits.

With these routines, I hope you’ll be able to achieve 10x results.

#1: Audit your calendar and align your schedule with your top priorities.

Make sure the meetings on your calendar move you forward on your most important goals. After you’ve defined your ruthless priorities, map out how meetings, reviews, and worksessions move those programs forward. Audit where you’re spending your time and remove as many unnecessary meetings as possible — aim for a minimum of 30% reduction. Time block your schedule to reduce context switching.

The reason you audit and align your calendar is to eliminate anything from distracting you from the priorities that will move your team and the business forward. This exercise has one of the largest impacts on your performance because it’s where you spend your time day-to-day. You never get more time in the day, but ruthless time management will help you get the most out of each one. Take back your schedule.

#2: Start every week with a planning session and end with a review.

On Monday morning, set aside 30 minutes to plan for the week ahead. On Friday, spend 60 minutes on a weekly review to recap the week, assess progress, and reflect on learnings. Making space for planning and reviewing will increase your velocity and progress against priorities. It will also highlight anything that’s creeping into your schedule that needs to be removed.

#3: Design your meetings for outcomes, and expect the same from others.

Meetings should only be to debate, decide, discuss, or develop your people. When you do require a meeting, make sure it has an agenda and clear outcomes. Otherwise, decline meetings like it’s your job. Everything else can happen asynchronously with digital tools.

I hope these routines give you the impact that they’ve provided for me. Reach out to me with any questions!

July 23, 2022

Elevating the Customer Journey

Appreciate Fast Company including me and other industry experts for our perspectives on how consumer psychology can help you identify ways to exceed expectations and drive customer satisfaction.

"Deep customer insight stems from understanding the needs, wants, and desires of the humans you’re designing for. The strongest design and product leaders use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, connecting behavioral and interaction data with ethnographic approaches like in-depth interviews. The quantitative data can tell you the “what” and “how many,” but the qualitative gives you the “why.”

July 13, 2021

Driving an Experience-led Product Development Process


Photo by Scott Webb from Pexels

I prefer an experience-led product development process. I could probably write a book on this one. For now, I’ll provide the core of my POV.

An experience-led process yields better outcomes. It de-risks going to market by ensuring you’re solving an actual customer problem and people desire what you’re bringing to market. It’s a measure twice, cut once approach where you avoid building things that no one wants.

Experience-led means the technology is in service of the experience, not the other way around. MVPs aren’t determined by what engineers can build in three months. If you’re only delivering the minimal, you probably aren’t delighting anyone.

Experience-led product development requires a cross-functional team and leverages human-centered design. It produces concrete artifacts that set the north star vision, materials to socialize, and aligns people through a shared understanding. It makes the future tangible.

A key artifact is the experience roadmap, outlining the path to the north star. It’s broken into experience releases that show the services and features required to power that experience. This keeps the team focused on customer value and impact, not just shipping something.

Experience-led means you widen the aperture at the beginning of the process to be inclusive. Not at the end.

Experience-led means you’re not working on features or pages, you’re thinking holistically about end-to-end experiences. Customer journeys are a thing.

Experience-led means the prototype determines the requirements. The actual experience you want to deliver is then deconstructed to figure out what to build first. The whole, then the parts.

If you’re interested in more on this topic, let me know.

May 1, 2021

How Design Creative Summit

I’m excited to join an awesome lineup at the HOW Design Creative Leadership Summit — focusing on emerging challenges faced by leaders in design, product, and engineering. Increase your impact by becoming an in-house intrapreneur and staying creative, productive, and sane as a leader in our new remote world.

I’ll be joined on the virtual stage with Maureen Carter (she, her, hers)Ryan RumseyArianna OrlandRania SvoronouChris WilkinsonFelix LeeDan Mall, and Stephen Gates, sharing insights and approaches on how to lead teams to get results. 

In my talk “Leading Innovation: Making Design Your Competitive Advantage”, I’ll share insights and frameworks of how to spearhead design-driven culture, followed by a 30-min Q+A.

February 1, 2021

Expedia Group Arrivals

I had the pleasure of being featured on the Life at Expedia Group blog as part of the New Arrivals series. In this interview, I talk about my journey into Experience Design, what excites me about Expedia, evolving us into an experience-led company, and the impact I plan to make this year.

January 11, 2021

New Adventure

Last week I started a new journey as Head of Design for Expedia Group.

I’m energized and humbled by the opportunity to demonstrate the power of an experience-led company and to reinvent the travel industry. Those that know me well, know how strong of a match this is. In this role, my passion for building strong Design culture, shaping agile organizations, and driving product and service innovation through human-centered design will merge with my life-long connection to travel.

It’s an honor to become part of this amazing company and lead such a talented Design organization. Huge thank you to everyone at Expedia for the exceptionally warm welcome.

I’m excited to help define what’s next for Expedia, the travel industry, and beyond.

August 14, 2020

Embracing Change

Sharing this quote from Bruce Mau, co-founder of The Massive Change Network. When you're leading transformation, it's all too easy to not acknowledge what is already working.

How do you help people embrace change?

Here’s a good rule of thumb: for every one change initiative, create two celebrations of what’s already working. Emphasis on what’s working may seem redundant, but it often reflects a neglected reality — and the effect is to create a “field of safety” that makes change easier to accept.

Before people can embrace innovation, they need to feel safe. Therefore, the best way to foster change is to reinforce stability. In our rush to initiate change, we often ignore what’s already working. We take it for granted. If you want to fix what’s wrong, first celebrate what’s right and expand it where you can. Before building new structures, recognize the ones that are fine as they are. Applaud success and accomplishments. And make this celebration visible: be sure that people see it.”

— from Mau: MC24

July 31, 2020

Accelerated Transformation

With summer in high gear, the myriad of post-pandemic reports are touting rapid change and prep for a new normal. Companies have been talking about the transformation they’ve undergone during the pandemic, including Satya Nadella stating in an earnings call, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Companies have moved quickly during this time, leveling up to meet the new digital demands of customers, addressing technology debt, outdated infrastructure, and software tooling — all with the goal to come out the other side leaner and more agile in this new environment.

COVID-19: Implications for business
Amazon Pushing Deeper into Banking in the Post-Pandemic World
Open Banking Gets a Big Jump Start from COVID
Accenture’s CEO: 5 rules for rethinking digital transformation during COVID-

June 25, 2020

The Business Impact of Design

I had the pleasure of being interviewed for Forrester's report The Business Impact of Design, which was published in June and recently promoted by InVision.

Envisioning and designing great experiences is only one lens of design leadership — you have to be able to demonstrate the business impact your work is having. Without that, it's just a shiny object.

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Design leadership and operations, building world-class organizations that integrate human-centered design to drive product innovation and customer-centric culture.

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The present is a beta of a better future.