March 22, 2023

Navigating Organizational Politics: The Importance Of Shared Outcomes, Alliances, And Partnerships

Let’s break two myths out of the gate.

Keeping your head down and doing great work in isolation never yields the impact you want — it takes a team. And you can’t ignore organizational politics if you want to be successful.

As you move through your career, as you elevate and take on more significant roles, you learn that the lone hero model is a farce. Building products is a team sport. And when you’re driving transformation, collaboration is even more critical since you need to create a movement to make progress.

The relationships you build across the organization are crucial to getting any work out the door, let alone great work. Your network, reputation, and partners all come into play when driving strategic programs. Operational leadership is required to get things done, but you need shared outcomes, alliances, and partnerships to make your efforts successful.

1: Find ways to develop shared outcomes with other leaders.

You’ll run into challenges, and sometimes even a brick wall, when your agenda and goals are at odds with another leader.

Sometimes this happens because you’re driving transformation that would change the power dynamics that the leader is quite comfortable with. Other times it’s because you haven’t taken the time to get to know the individual, what’s important to them, and how to align what you are trying to achieve with what they’re going after. Let’s hope it’s the latter, and I’ll save that other topic for another article.

Shared outcomes are the way to get everyone facing the same direction.

2: Build alliances across, up, and diagonally within the company.

Alliances are the people that warm the room.

They’re the people that speak highly of you when you’re not present. The champions that start from a place of positive intent with your proposals. They’re not just people that like you; they’re people that want to help you succeed.

Alliances are critical to your success since they are often not directly involved in your programs but have work that loosely aligns or has dependencies. Usually, these alliances start because you garner alignment and trust; by doing so, the efforts you’re partnering on enable you to row in the same direction. When you begin to feel the wind on your back instead of your face, that’s when these alliances are working.

3: Drive collaboration with partners to get things done.

Get to know leaders across disciplines and teams that you’ll need to work with closely to get things done. Building great products and services requires teams that understand the meaning of collaboration and how to leverage each other’s expertise and strengths. So take the time to understand where your partners are coming from and what they’re trying to achieve, then develop alignment. Get to know them as people beyond the work you’re doing. Lean in and help them with something they’re trying to accomplish, support new proposals, and lead by example in the ways you’d like them to show up for you.

And pay attention to peer relationships. They are some of the most critical partnerships you’ll have. Your peer connections are more important than you think; along with your boss, they’re your “first team.”

Reflection Activity

If you haven’t created a stakeholder map/matrix in a while, you’re probably not paying enough attention to your relationships.

My recommendation is to couple the matrix with a plan for each individual and revisit it monthly. In Leading Without Authority, Keith Ferrazzi discusses creating a “Relationship Action Plan” for each person — that’s how meaningful building and maintaining relationships are to success. If this type of artifact doesn’t exist, take the time this week to create it. You’ll be surprised by what you learn and how much more intentional you will become in building solid relationships across the enterprise.

February 26, 2023

Increasing Influence: 4 Ways To Create Strong Partnerships And Alliances Across The Organization

People often overlook their relationships and networks’ importance in achieving positive outcomes.

Stop wasting time thinking you must do it yourself, and start making the time to invest in your relationships with peers, partners, and stakeholders. Not only will it enrich your experience and give you tailwinds, but many things you’re driving hinge on your ability to influence others — especially any change management or transformation work.

Here are four ways to expand your network and organizational influence:

1: Create connections that go beyond the basics.

Leverage 1:1s to understand partners’ and stakeholders’ visions, goals, and mindsets.

Find out what’s essential and drives them. Share what you’re doing and how you want to partner to reach those goals together. Think through a plan to get there. Take a similar approach with your boss (and their boss and peers) as you build your relationship.

Create forums or small groups to go deeper on topics and create an environment to share ideas, input, and feedback.

Many times, larger meetings aren’t the place for deep discussions. Create a space where you can have them with groups of 3–5 people. Ask for and share feedback once you’ve established a repertoire.

This step is a litmus of how well you’ve created an environment of openness and learning.

Align on shared outcomes that you work towards together. Instead of staying heads down in your world, spend time collaborating with partners and peers. Align your goals with what’s essential to the business — move the metrics that matter.

Cross the finish line together and continuously nurture these relationships.

2: Bring your systems thinking and enterprise mindset to the table.

Having a point of view within your area of expertise will be natural, which is required to gain credibility as an expert at what you do.

But where real enterprise operators are a cut above is when you lean into conversations outside your wheelhouse. Have a point of view on business topics and adjacent spaces that aren’t your discipline. Demonstrate across and up that you are thinking about the business and understand how functions come together across the enterprise to deliver value.

Make it evident that you are paying attention to the market and trends that could impact the company.

Establishing yourself as a functional expert is one thing, but showing up as an enterprise leader who understands how things connect will get you the street cred required to get included in strategic conversations and sought out for your opinion beyond topics around your discipline. Be prepared for meetings, and make sure you’re contributing.

Take inventory if you find yourself in meetings where you’re not talking.

3: Share thoughts and approaches early and often with others.

Don’t keep everything to yourself until it’s polished, waiting for a grand reveal.

Instead, invite peers and partners to contribute to proposals to make them better or highlight something you’ve overlooked. Strengthen your pitch by getting input and feedback from others. When others contribute and share diverse perspectives, the proposals are more robust and well-rounded, and others view your open and collaborative nature as something to reciprocate.

Socialize ideas before large meetings through 1:1 conversations.

“Warm the room” by having champions for your ideas and proposals before stepping into the [virtual] room. Meet with key stakeholders and showcase that you’ve addressed their concerns so they can provide support. This approach turns what would typically be a high-pressure approval meeting into a discussion of next steps.

It will feel uncomfortable at first — work through that apprehension and do it anyways.

4: Team across the enterprise.

Offer to lead or help on a program that cuts across business groups and is of strategic value for the company.

Use the opportunity to meet people you don’t usually work with and expand your network. Gain visibility on a company priority, and show up as an enterprise leader concerned about outcomes that have an impact. If someone else is on point, be a strong contributor and use that experience to build stronger connections with the people in the core team.

Keep those connections even after program completion, and find ways to broaden your network’s reach continually.

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.

September 1, 2022

Design Hiring in 2022: Elevating culture to attract the right talent

Thanks Andrew Hogan and Figma for highlighting my post “10 Truths From Building Design Organizations at Scale” in your 2022 Design Hiring report, Elevating culture to attract the right talent. Great insights and perspective throughout — very timely and relevant.

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!

August 20, 2022

The People Who Have Influenced My Design Practice and Leadership 

Throughout my career, I’ve been influenced and inspired by many people, books, and experiences that have shaped my approach to the work. But there are a few who’s philosophy and perspectives have become part of my designer DNA and ethos.

By internalizing their teachings and perspective and evolving from them, I can attribute the foundation of my design practice and leadership to these influential people, who continue to inspire me and constantly renew my passion for design:

Charles and Ray Eames

“The details are not the details. They make the product.”

Not only were Ray and Charles an amazing couple well known for their modern furniture design, they pioneered work in film, environments, textiles, and architecture, and pushed the boundaries of what design means and could be. Their bar for quality and attention to detail are why I exude the mantra that the details are what separates good from great.

When asked by Madame L’Amic, curator of the exhibition “Qu’est ce que le design? (What is Design?)” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais de Louvre in 1972, Charles Eames responds:

Q: “What are the boundaries of Design?”
A: “What are the boundaries of problems?”

Bruce Mau

“Design is the ability to imagine a future and systematically execute that vision. So if you think about what all designers do, they’re all futurists. They’re all thinking about what’s going to happen. They’re going to make something new happen in the world. They’re all trying to make the world a better place. I’ve yet to meet a designer who wakes up in the morning thinking, “I think we could do something worse.” That’s not our mandate. That ability to create a vision is one of the most powerful tools that a designer has. We don’t really understand how powerful it is — it’s an incredible power to create the future by showing somebody what it looks like.”

If you haven’t read Massive Change and MA24 — do it.

Dieter Rams

Dieter is a goldmine of quotes and inspiration, especially his ten principles for good design. Modern, minimal, and timeless, his “as little design as possible” philosophy always has me pushing teams to find the elegance in a solution, paring it back to its essence. Distill complexity, expose simplicity. But I find his approach to life and expectations for designers even more intriguing.

“Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should — and must — question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits.They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.”

Brigitte Borja de Mozota

“Design is a management tool that creates differentiation in the internal capabilities of the company. Design is no longer seen as the output of design-form, but as a creative and management process that can be integrated into other organization processes, such as idea management, innovation management, and research and development management, and that modifies the traditional structure of process management in a company.”

Brigitte is a researcher in management science, and wrote one of the first books I read on Design Management, which became my handbook. Her work on The Four Powers of Design clearly outlines a balanced scorecard approach to measuring and communicating Design’s impact.

These leaders have shaped my design leadership approach, my practice, and inspired me to shape the world around me. I hope by sharing this it will move others to learn more about them and become inspired themselves.

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.”

June 12, 2022

10 Truths From Building Design Organizations at Scale

Observations from a chief design executive that apply across industries and companies.

Photo by Ngai Man Yan

Having the opportunity to build design orgs in some of the largest companies in the world, I’ve observed that even with completely different cultures, org structures, and industries…some things stay the same.

  1. You will never have enough designers. You will never have enough time. You will always be building the plane while it’s flying. Design is a valuable, scarce resource. The sooner you navigate this truth and use it to your advantage, the sooner you build leverage.
  2. Design transformation is company transformation. The work you’re doing isn’t just for the design org. Becoming an experience-led company transforms the culture. Realize that change management is your job.
  3. Chart tomorrow’s vision while building for today. North stars are in the ether if you’re not improving current experiences. Drive impact in the short-, medium-, and long-term. Short-term wins become proof points that build reputation and provide runway. The medium-term is where the magic happens.
  4. Show up as a company leader, not just a functional leader. Design cuts across orgs and teams, which provides a unique view of the environment. When you make that mindset switch, you’ll get pulled into the conversations and decision making you wanted all along.
  5. Always be recruiting. The coffee chat you have today might be a future hire five years from now. You are responsible for treating your talent pipeline like a supply chain, always keep it moving.
  6. Your “first team” is your boss and peers, not your directs. If you only focus down, you’ll realize you’ve been neglecting across and up. That’s where important communication, relationships, and visibility is required for the success of your organization.
  7. Be the matchmaker. Connecting the dots across the company will unearth teams that don’t talk to each other, duplicative efforts, and opportunity areas. Build the network, streamline the work, and unearth new business models.
  8. Trust is the foundation of all great teams. Take the time to build trust with your team, throughout your org, with your peers, and your manager. Take a 360 degree approach, and be the constant gardener.
  9. No one understands what you do, so explain it to them. Don’t leave the design process in an opaque box that produces magic. The more people understand the complexity and rigor behind the work, the more others will respect and champion Design.
  10. As you scale, the talent you hire and the mechanisms/levers you create will determine how your culture evolves. Make sure you’re minding the shop and sharing artifacts that guide decision making and incentivize desired behaviors.

May 15, 2022

Mastering Orchestration: 8 Ways to Drive Business Outcomes as a Design Leader 

Connecting competitive advantage and value to customer and business impact.

As a Chief Design Officer (SVP/VP Design, Head of Design, etc.), you’re responsible for connecting the value and competitive advantage that design creates to customer and business impact. Here are eight ways to drive business outcomes no matter what scale you’re operating.

  1. Decode corporate strategy and connect the threads. Translate the corporate mission, vision, and strategic intent into the differentiating design capabilities that will provide competitive advantage. Develop a clear thread that ties the strategies together — from corporate strategy all the way down through to experience strategy. Illuminate the alignment and connection. Translate corporate objectives into design objectives.
  2. Define an inspiring design vision and clear execution path. Create the design vision, and the three-year strategic plan, principles, roadmap, and operating plan to get there. Define goals that lead to the clear outcomes and milestones defined in the strategic plan. Develop an inspiring vision of the future. Make strategy tangible through narrative and prototypes. Socialize, get feedback, and communicate far and wide.
  3. Drive a dual operating system. Deliver for today while making strategic investments in the future. Orient towards experience maps and roadmaps that paint a clear North Star and define the progress signposts on the way there. Make sure you’re executing short-term responsibilities while also shaping the future. Align your best talent to the most critical work for the company, while making space for exploration to go after what’s next.
  4. Identify beacon programs. Use beacons as the light that guides the organization to new ways of working. These become your case studies and examples of how being experience-led yields better outcomes. Leverage these programs as catalysts to embed human-centered design into the fabric of the organization.
  5. Make teaming a priority and build organizational leadership muscle. The larger and more matrixed the company, the more important this will become. This is a requirement if you want to reinvent any experience at scale. Teaming across the organization will pull together diverse, cross-functional perspectives, forge strong working relationships, increase collaboration, and accelerate the work needed to achieve the business outcomes you’ve defined.
  6. Create quality and coherence mechanisms. Leverage orchestration and governance to create experience cohesion. There’s an interesting dichotomy that happens as you elevate as a leader and your organization scales. You can no longer be close to every program, and yet, you need to be able to hold the quality bar and ensure cohesion.
  7. Show don’t tell. Measure what matters, and align to shared outcomes and metrics wherever possible. Define leading and lagging metrics for all of your priorities/objectives. Benchmark current state and get moving.
  8. Connect design outcomes to customer and business impact. As a [design] leader, there’s a critical difference between stating and demonstrating business impact. How you measure progress and the effectiveness of your plan is where the rubber meets the road. Develop a scorecard, impact reports, narrative artifacts, and ongoing communication. Continuously communicate progress across and up.

March 10, 2022

How Design Thinking and Emerging Technology Will Enhance Travel Experiences

Customer experience has become a significant competitive advantage in the travel industry, magnified by shifts in what travelers value. We’re on the cusp of an evolution in how emerging technology will enhance the travel experience from start to finish, moving from reactive to anticipatory and proactive customer experiences. 

Evolving expectations 

With more ways to spend their time and money than ever before, people expect more from their customer experiences. Today’s experiences are benchmarked against the best across all industries, which means companies compete with experiences completely outside their category for mindshare and wallet. So, when a company disrupts an industry or makes their service incredibly easy or more delightful, consumers wonder why everything can’t be that simple. Turns out, travel and technology are good companions. 

In the past, when a flight was canceled, it was enough for a travel company to supply travelers with the connection points and contact information to fix the issues themselves. We’re no longer in that era. Now, travelers will compare the self-service experience of dealing with a flight cancellation with the ease and simplicity of their favorite app — regardless of industry. The end-to-end service travelers receive is considered part of the product experience itself. 

The shift of customer focus from products to services to experiences has been happening for years, and the pandemic has only amplified the need for meaningful connection. Travelers are placing greater value on the trips they’re taking and the memories they are making. A recent report from Expedia Group found that 50% of travelers plan to spend more on trips than they did prior to the pandemic. 

Higher consumer expectations, coupled with an increased emphasis on the role of travel in our lives, has raised the bar considerably for travel providers who want to deliver great experiences.  

Human-Centered Design 

To become a traveler-centric company, we must put our deep understanding of traveler needs, preferences, and behaviors at the core of our work. Human-Centered Design allows our cross-functional teams to activate our expertise and innovate in real time: connecting travelers with inspiring ideas to explore their world, streamlining the planning process, and keeping relevant information at their fingertips throughout their trip. 

While historically, travel providers have viewed the transaction as the end of a traveler’s experience, Human-Centered Design enables an experience-led product and service design process that maps the traveler’s journey end-to-end and informs every touchpoint they have along the way. 

A shift to holistic thinking and personalized experiences 

The travel industry has a history of optimizing experiences for search and transactions. Instead of focusing on the transaction, travel providers need to focus on the relationship travelers have with their brand and use that to build more intuitive, personalized, and proactive experiences. Taking a more holistic view of the experience frees us from thinking in transactional silos and highlights how all the pieces interconnect. From discovery and planning, to booking, in-trip, and post-trip — it helps connect the journey across all channels and time. 

Travelers don’t see parts of the experience or features in isolation, to them it’s all one experience — and that’s exactly how companies need to see it too. 

Making technology human 

Technology is an enabler of great experiences. Leveraging artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and predictive analytics, companies can create hyper-personalized interactions that adapt to a traveler’s context and work across every aspect of their journey. At their core, experiences need to be humanized, starting with a cohesive design and conversational tone, removing jargon, reducing complexity, and streamlining interactions.  

Once that foundation is ready, companies can deliver real-time, personalized experiences that meet travelers where they are and provide the right information, at the right time, in the right context. Personalization unlocks a new level of experience quality. It moves us from a ‘one-to-many’ to a ‘one-to-one’ conversation with customers. Reflecting people’s needs and preferences while providing value at every interaction also builds trust. Companies can use data to anticipate issues and solve them using customer preferences and light touch interactions. 

Natural language processing allows for multimodal interaction, so travelers can interact in the most natural way for them — whether that’s through typing, tapping, or voice. Voice interaction will become increasingly prevalent over time, enabling a new generation of experiences that deliver actionable insights and real-time personalized interfaces. 

What’s next – hyper-personalization and prediction 

What’s considered bleeding-edge now will become table stakes in the future as customers’ expectations evolve. Where we’re heading is hyper-personalized interactions that adapt to context, work across the entire journey, and solve problems before travelers even know they have them — the future is predictive and proactive.  

This shifts us from a place where flight cancellations cause additional time and stress, to a world where issues are solved before travelers even know there’s a problem. A world where flights are rebooked and itineraries updated before travelers even know their flight was canceled, with orchestration happening behind the scenes, reducing the complexity and stress when things change. Systems that get better the more you interact with them, increasing value to travelers by anticipating their needs. 

This is where the power of journey orchestration and proactive experiences really come into view. Travel providers that take advantage of this trend can create better customer experiences, achieve higher conversion rates, and increase the value of each trip. They also can build long-term relationships with travelers instead of just transactions.

Originally posted at MyCustomer

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