Leadership Archives

February 5, 2023

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

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 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.

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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 Rumsey, Arianna Orland, Rania Svoronou, Chris Wilkinson, Felix Lee, Dan 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.

December 17, 2019

Design Trends – Talent

“ You can't be a successful unicorn hunter if you’re going to bring people into a horrible culture. You have to create an environment that creatives want to be a part of.”

https://www.invisionapp.com/talks/design-trends-talent
https://www.invisionapp.com/design-trends-report-talent