Accidental Leaders: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of Senior Design Leadership

Anderson Gomes at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/kysJUltf8Z0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Who I am and how I ended up leading

[00:00:00] Are you hearing me well? Okay. First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity of talking to you today. I'd like to thank also the UXDX organization for setting this all up, and I would like to ask claps for them, because they did it all. Today we're going to do a little adventure into uncharted waters of design leadership, and I hope you enjoy and you like this journey with me.

[00:00:31] First of all, today is Children's Day in Brazil, so all Brazilians usually change their profile pictures to old pictures they have. This is me at five in Rio de Janeiro, in a really proud position because I climbed a rock of two meters. I was born in this place. It was a scary environment, but my parents were fantastic. They were super creative in this scenario, and teaching me a lot about resilience and how to be a leader since the beginning.

[00:01:08] I'm living in Amsterdam for two years. I got married recently with Talita, who did the best party of the year. Probably a Vogue magazine will give a prize to us or something, I don't know. I like to sail boats in tropical islands, and my career in UX started with a dissatisfaction, because I hate bureaucracy and I hate to have bad experiences as a customer. If you want to see me sad, send me to a bank agency and let me wait in the line for a long time.

[00:01:37] Talking a little bit more about my career, I started in design many years ago, but my first experience as a leader was at Kazo [?], this last company. I started there as the first employee. It was a garage startup with me and the founders only. I was the only UX, and after three years working there they just said, okay, you are the oldest designer in the company, manage. And then I said, okay, I never fired someone, I never hired someone, I never evaluated, I never reported. I know nothing about management. I know everything about design.

[00:02:18] After that I worked in other startups like Youse [?], which was an insurtech. Hotmart was a creative economy startup, and now I work at Bol.com. Bol.com is the biggest e-commerce in the Netherlands, where I live, and also in Belgium. And that's it. When I was working at Youse [?] I started sharing a little bit about this journey, when a designer joins in this management and leadership adventure, and then I found many people that were also already struggling in this position, like "oh, I just recently got to management," and found some common people with me.

[00:02:54] After that I started doing some courses, design leadership workshops, and now, six years later, we did 26 editions with more than 1,000 students already, teaching design leadership. My purpose with these workshops was always to help design leaders to be more conscious, more confident and more prepared to lead. So I decided to split my presentation into three chapters. We're going to go into the orange, green and blue color.

Being conscious: what design is, and what it isn't

[00:03:24] The first one is to be conscious about the current situation of design leadership. Basically, design is easy, right? You agree? You have to know about ergonomics, you have to know about metrics, you have to know about service, about Figma, about prototypes, about variables, now about coding sometimes, about facilitation. And then you feel like this guy: yes, I'm trying to handle, I'm trying to learn all of these.

[00:03:52] But in the end, what we do is interfaces, and I see that the community is not proud anymore about this thing. "Oh, I don't do UI anymore, I'm a UX, I'm a product designer." But it's important to understand what it means to do interfaces. Interface is anything between faces. It's super broad. So in this case the hammer is an interface between her hand and the nail. Try to nail with your hand, it will be much harder. So you have an interface like a hammer to help her with the jobs to be done that she has. But interface, in the end, can be interaction, services, products, platforms, processes, experience. So doing interfaces is broad, it's not specific.

[00:04:41] And then, in the end, design is not a science. We have many variations, many methods, and there's no recipe to design that you can replicate in the same scenario and guarantee the same results. That's why it's not science. I see designers as treasure hunters, because we go from clue to clue, nearer to the final treasure. We try to find this treasure that usually is product-market fit, and then we open this box to the product managers, to other people, and say, yeah, I found gold. But everybody is always with a shovel asking, hey, can I dig? And then you say, no, no, no, wait, I'm still finding the next clue.

[00:05:24] In the end, the purpose of UX design is to humanize things. We want to guarantee that things are more desirable, more useful, more easy to use, more trustful. And then it turns out to be the pitch of design. It's underlying in our conversation with business. In the end, we believe that if the product is more humanized, then it will be better for business. There's no guarantee of that. We have a lack of evidence of it, but we believe as a community that if you have more desirable, we're going to have more trust, more loyalty, more recommendation, more member-get-member, better NPS, a better CSAT, more cross-selling, more average ticket, and go on on business metrics. In the end we are trying to lower the risks of launching something and failing badly.

Confidence: from design unicorn to baby shark

[00:06:18] About confidence. When you lead people you have to be secure about yourself. You have to inspire people and make them feel safe in which direction you are going. So we studied a lot and we became the design unicorn. Who here feels like a unicorn that knows methods of design, can facilitate, can prototype, can do anything in design? Don't be shy. Okay, we are hiring. I will share a QR code in the end, so we're going to talk later.

[00:06:51] But then suddenly, when you are this unicorn, you turn out to have this opportunity to lead, to be a principal, to be a staff, to lead a project maybe. And then there are some assumptions when people get promoted. "Oh, now people will work for me, I can do whatever I want, because I'm a leader." "Business will finally understand me because now I have a seat at the table." Or, "I will work much less because people will be working for me." I can spoil you: it's not true.

[00:07:21] And then suddenly you come to a board table as that strong unicorn you were, and then you turn out to be a baby shark inside of a shark tank. You face these people that are super experienced in business. They are there doing this for 20 years. They've grown billionaire companies before. They talk all their language, they use many abbreviations that designers are not familiar with, and then you just feel like, hey, they gave me the crayon to do some drawings while they discuss the things.

[00:07:56] I like a lot this quote from Alvin Toffler. He says, if you don't have a strategy, you are part of someone else's strategy. Basically, if you don't define your strategy, someone will include you in their strategy, and in the end you are just servicing as a designer. So it's important to define or be defined. I have this phrase tattooed in my belly here, because it guides my life. If you don't decide, you are also deciding. If you don't have a plan, someone will have. So it's important to define what's your vision, where you want to go with the design, or the chamber, your legion.

What good leaders have in common

[00:08:39] But okay, what's common between good leaders? I don't know if you have seen The Playbook, the Netflix series. It's a good selection of leaders talking about their experiences as leaders. Every leader has a cause or a purpose behind. They also have followers, when they convince other people of this cause, so people start following them. They also have antagonists, because any time you want to change something, you're going to find people that love the inertia, the way it is. They want to stay as it is.

[00:09:14] And then you're going to have to be brave, and with fear, because braveness is not fearless. Braveness is going even with fear inside yourself. So you have to position yourself. Sometimes you're going to have to challenge the status quo, and then you're also going to have your imperfections and flaws, because no leader is perfect. Leadership is a visceral journey. You're going to deal with many emotions, many tough decisions. The higher you go, the less mentorship you're going to have, the less clear the next step you're going to take is. There is a book that talks a lot about this. It's not a design book, it's a business book, I can say. It's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things, from Ben Horowitz. It's full of cases of hard, tough decisions that a leader faces in their career.

[00:10:07] So okay, how to be prepared to be a good leader? The first thing is to understand that going to management is not a career evolution. It's not a promotion. It's a career change. You're going to go to another area. It's not a continuation of design. You're going to have to study other things. You come from this background where you know many skills of design, and you have the necessity to learn as soon as possible many management skills, like budget, hiring, career evolution, feedback, evaluation, tough tradeoffs, decision making, all those things.

[00:10:47] It's important to differentiate what's management and what's leadership. Management is to make things stay as they are. So when you manage, you want to have control of things, you want to have predictability, so you don't want things to change. When you manage, you want things under control. When you lead, you are trying to have movement. You are pushing people forward. They are almost the opposite. You see, this is movement, this is stay.

[00:11:18] And they also have different skills. Leadership is much more on the will, on the soft skills, on the behavioral part, and management is something more learnable, more technical skills that you can learn. In between these two, you're probably going to have to do both. If you manage people, you're going to have to lead, have the posture, but you're also going to have to report. But if you are a craft design leader, you're going to have to take care of all these automations, also about the design process, because you are a leader in a specific set of roles.

Lead yourself first

[00:11:54] It starts from yourself. If you don't lead yourself, you won't lead anyone. And my question here is, who is in charge of your life? Are you leading your life, or just following what happens? If you don't lead yourself, you can't lead other people. So how do you re-energize? Are you re-energizing on Red Bull, coffee, games and cola, or are you really re-energizing when you have some punches that are going to happen during your career?

[00:12:24] Another important fact is how dependent you are on your job. If your personal life depends on that job to pay the bills, probably you won't be brave enough. You won't take the risks to be a leader. So having financial safety is also important. Most people get promoted and also raise the cost of life, because "oh, now I have more money." It's important to have safety and savings.

[00:12:53] In the end, what I suggest to you is to be sapiens. Sapiens is a book from Harari. He also wrote 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, something like this. But this thing is basically that you graduated in design, but you are not a designer. Design is just a tool in your belt. You can put more things in the belt. Probably most of the people here in this audience will live 100 years. You can graduate much more than just your first graduation that you did when you were young. Don't let this define what you're going to be for the rest of your life.

[00:13:34] And I had this professor, we called him Saada [?], that when I graduated he said this. I was doing two graduations at the same time, one at night, one in the morning, and he said, don't let the university be in the way of your studies. And I took that, and I started studying anything, like economics, anthropology, because it was free. The university was free.

Learn, earn and return

[00:14:00] So now we're going to pass through three steps that I recommend you to do this career transition. The first one is learn, and we're going to do learn, earn and return. Learn: you're going to have to read other books. You're going to have to go to other events. Stop going only to design events, stop going only to development events. Open your mind to other areas, because if you don't have something in common with these other people, you can't relate, you can't have communication. You have to have something in common to speak their language. Also, I recommend you to have other mentors, other alliances that are not common, not in the design bubble anymore.

[00:14:41] Earn. What I mean by earn: you have to earn the respect from the people around you. What I recommend is to frame a small, specific problem that you can solve this month. Don't go for everything. Don't go overcomplicated, overthinking. What's your mission? Another good advice is to trust your team. If you don't trust them, they won't trust you. You have to do the first step: trust your team, delegate things and expect they will succeed.

[00:15:12] Another important thing is to build this team, building this camaraderie around you where people like to help each other. It's important to have this feeling, this vibe, this good vibe around you. So you're going to have some quick wins, some early wins, and probably this will be more connected with lead indicators. For example, now I'm researching more, our prototypes are more consistent. In the first moment it will be lead indicators, but don't forget to aim for the needle movement in the KPIs.

[00:15:45] And also, don't forget your origin. Return means that you have to always remember your purpose. In the end, you're not designing for yourself. You're designing for someone else. You have to be user-centric. You have to care about them, not about you. In the end, share your learnings, because you learn a lot when you teach people. And show fragility. It's not a problem. The best way to get confidence from other people is to show that you are human and you're not perfect.

What makes a design leader different

[00:16:15] One common question that I receive from my students is, okay, what differentiates a design leader from any other leader? In my opinion, what differentiates is our principles. When you design, you try to have empathy. You try to get out of the building and face reality. Not every business leader does that. You try to experiment. You can prototype things fast, you can test, and you also can facilitate workshops. This is also a different ability. You can also automate things. You know how to scale, you know how to talk with developers, and you have the storytelling power in your hand, so you know how to tell a story from beginning to the end, and this is also a useful ability.

[00:17:03] Another important thing, that Riya [?] also touched on today, is to avoid emotional data, avoid the bias, especially when you are doing management things. For example, it's common to hire people similar to you. It's a bias. It's also common to defend design at all costs, and in the end you see that we are just looking for data to prove your emotional conclusion. You're not being neutral to find the truth. You are just taking data to say, yes, I told you, I'm right. So it's ego in the end.

[00:17:39] Another suggestion I have is, at a board table or with executives, don't defend design. Defend user-centricity. Stick to your purpose. It's not about using empathy maps. It's not about using Lean Inception or Design Sprints or whatever. It's not about that. In the end, what executives expect from design is that this company is facing the reality and it's not a fragility for the business, because if you don't have a good relationship with your users, someone else can create a startup and drop the big company because of that fragility. We avoid risk. Design is here to avoid the risk of all the users getting out. That's the risk we are trying to avoid.

[00:18:26] Basically, you're going to have to stop reading, or read fewer books of design. I did here a graduation of books I read during this year, about design, and design and leadership. Actually, it's rare to have a design leadership book. There is one that I like a lot. The name is Liftoff. You can check it later. Actually it's not here, but yeah, the name is Liftoff. But most of the books on this side are about hiring, about agile, about financial, about business, about hard decisions.

Leadership tools and a treasure hunt

[00:19:00] As I mentioned before, unicorns, are you there? We have a position, many positions. You can scan this QR code, and this time now take your phone, because we're going to show many QR codes. So the first one has positions. Please sign up. Can I change? I see some cell phones yet. Yes, okay.

[00:19:22] Another thing that I want to share with you is that during this year, teaching my students about design leadership, I got fascinated by, actually addicted to, spreadsheets. I love to do formulas, and I love to scale up and to connect things with Webflow and spreadsheets all the time. So I created this website called Leadership Tools. In the beginning it was basically in Portuguese. I translated it just for this event, yes. And then you can download these spreadsheets. You can buy them, and then you have a discount code of UXDX. You can buy there. This will help you to kick off. Okay, I don't know how to do one-on-ones. I don't know how to manage my design system. I don't know how to evaluate skills of my team. I don't know how to manage their salaries and goals, all the things. I have many templates there that you can download.

[00:20:18] Can I change? Okay. I would like also to thank Deborah. Deborah was the illustrator that did all this fun in the animations. I worked with her for the last 10 years, and she's awesome. She's open for freelance, and if you want to hire her, especially to live in Amsterdam with me, I would love that.

[00:20:39] And I have a surprise. I have five treasures in this place, actually one in each corner and one around the middle, and basically it's below the chair. It's something like a package like this, with golden chocolate coins. But then, if you find these golden chocolate coins... Anyone found something like this below the chairs? No? Oh, you're going to have to be more treasure hunters. Take the next clue. Okay, okay, don't kill yourself. But then, if you find this, you're going to come later to the side of the stage and I will give you all the spreadsheets from Leadership Tools. It's treasure, right? For free. And that's it, people. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:21:43] Host: Okay, thank you very much, Anderson. I'll start with the first question, just for myself. What do you think are the most common challenges you've seen when you or others are unexpectedly put into leadership positions?

[00:21:54] Anderson: Can you repeat?

[00:21:56] Host: Yeah, I'll come closer. It's always a bit of feedback. What's the most common challenge you've seen when someone is unexpectedly put into a leadership position? What's the number one thing that you think they're going to come across straight away, to deal with?

[00:22:08] Anderson: The first challenge you're going to face is to drop the Figma. Stop prototyping.

[00:22:13] Host: Say that again, sorry.

[00:22:16] Anderson: Stop prototyping. And then the second part you're going to have is to show design value, because it's not easy to measure design. It's not easy to measure user-centricity. It's not obvious. It's too subjective. You can have NPS, you can have CSAT, but they are not enough to measure what you need. And people will try to ask you, why should I invest more in design? Convince me. They will open this question to you, and you have to convince them.

[00:22:48] Host: Okay, and we'll move on to questions from the audience. What would you say to a designer who loves to craft design but is pushed to become a leader in order to grow in their organization?

[00:22:59] Anderson: Pushing the puller. Most of the time, designers think that leadership is something that you're going to face in the future, but actually design needs leadership since you were a junior, because there is a phrase from Jared Spool that says that design is the rendering of intent. Design doesn't happen by coincidence. Have you seen a project where a designer analyzed everything and said, yes, let's stay the same, I don't want to change anything? Never saw this project. Designers like to change everything. So if you want to change, you're going to have to lead change. You are already used to leading, and then it's not optional. Leadership is not something that designers can do later. They are doing it now. Otherwise they won't convince the developers, the GPMs, the stakeholders about what change they want to do. So I think that being a principal or a staff is not different. You will also be exposed to the board. You'll also be contested. You also have to bring a broad perspective to design.

[00:24:01] Host: Okay, so how to come back from leadership to design?

[00:24:06] Anderson: Oh, I think it's impossible. If you turn out to be a leader once, it doesn't mean management. It doesn't mean you can't stop managing people, but it's hard to take off the initiative, the visual feeling you have. It's like a virus. When you know what user-centricity means, you're going to fight for it. I confess, it's an addiction to think about other people, to think about, hey, am I doing a relevant product? Am I doing something that lets people have a better life or a worse life? We are concerned about these things, about humanity, and this is the essence of leadership.

[00:24:43] Host: Okay, cool. Someone's asking, can you please share that amazing deck? We'll come back to that one. Is it very hard for teams when you're... sorry, it's very hard to read also. I'll try one more time. It's very hard for teams when your lead is an exceptional designer who was given a promotion to manage them, but he starts designing. How do we keep calm with managers like this?

[00:25:13] Anderson: Take off the Figma access. And the Miro board, also: view only, view only. And tie your hands.

[00:25:25] Host: Okay.

[00:25:28] Anderson: Yes, but I think that stakeholders are also important in the process. We say all the time that we are user-centric, people-centric, but we don't interview business people to understand what takes off your sleep in the night, what concerns you. We also have to have empathy with our colleagues. They're also trying to achieve an objective. So we also have to listen to this leader and say, okay, what's your concern that makes you open the file? What worries you? So we also have to empathize with them.

[00:26:01] Host: Okay. What was the Netflix film you recommended earlier? What was the Netflix film, or was it a Netflix documentary, that you recommended earlier?

[00:26:12] Anderson: Oh, I like a lot The Playbook. But I will be biased, because these days I saw Band of Brothers. Band of Brothers is a lesson of leadership in every chapter, in every episode, and it's hard decisions, tough decisions. You see the emotional feeling of decisions. And there's also... I don't like wars, but as soon as I'm living in Europe, I'm studying a little bit more to get the context of the countries, and then these days I watched also World War II in Colour. Have you seen that? It's also on Netflix, and in many moments of this documentary you see that the personality of the leader changed the way the war went. Check it out later. But there are many. I can send a list of links later.

[00:27:01] Host: Okay, and that kind of leads into the next question. Can you suggest some books for someone who's preparing for that shift into leadership, or maybe some training and certificates?

[00:27:12] Anderson: Yeah, there is one that it's called Design Orgs, or... I never know the name of it. If you type "design orgs" you're going to find it in Google. And the Liftoff is really complete. It shows slowly feedback, and now leveling, and now hiring, and then it's really a step-by-step methodology.

[00:27:37] Host: Okay, and this next question is, to me this talk seems more about design management than design leadership. Do you think that there's a difference?

[00:27:44] Anderson: Yeah, for sure there is a difference, but you're going to have to wear many hats during your day. Usually you're going to have a meeting where you're going to face a feedback, a punch in your face, and then you have to go and give feedback to other people, or control budget for one hour. So you're going to shift from management and leadership during your day, during a week, many times. If I was talking about management much more, I would show how to manage user research, how to manage metrics, how to manage the design system, how to manage user insights or whatever. So yeah, you can be right, maybe, but yeah.

[00:28:23] Host: Okay, someone's asking quite a broad one, but how do you face your first 90 days in a new manager position? What kind of tips would you have there?

[00:28:30] Anderson: This is a good question. There's a book about it, actually, but my opinion is that you have to always have the curiosity of a researcher and the action of a UX designer. So treat your first 90 days as research. Every interview, every meeting you have with any stakeholder, it's a data point. Catalog what you learned, and after one month show to your boss, to your chief, to your lead: hey, this is what I mapped interviewing 30 people across the company, and I think this is the problem people are complaining about. Do research. This is basically my recommendation.

[00:29:10] Host: Look at this: greetings from your design team in the Netherlands, awesome presentation.

[00:29:17] Anderson: Okay. Don't encourage them. Don't.

[00:29:22] Host: If you could go back in time to the Kazo [?] times, which of the learnings you shared today would you apply first to your younger self?

[00:29:33] Anderson: Yeah, actually Gami [?] is someone that I lived with there in Kazo [?]. I hope it was a good experience. Yes. I learned many things, because at that time I was a complete noob, and at that time I let my emotions take care of my behaviors many times, and it's bad for a leader. You have to have a posture. You have to control your impulse, and this is, in my opinion, the best way to get rid of the bias you get. So the way you deal with your emotions changes the output you're going to give as a leader and the decisions you're going to make. So I believe that now I understand myself much more. I know the triggers and the emotional consequences I have, and also what I feel in my body when I'm angry or when I'm super happy. That is also a bias. When you are super optimistic, you tend to agree, to go with everything.

[00:30:32] Host: Okay, great. I think that's nearly all the questions. Is it? I think it is. Okay, listen, much appreciated. Thanks for that talk. That was very interesting. Please put your hands together for Andre, or Anderson Gomez, and also...