Design-Driven Leadership

Mrinali Kamath at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/5OsDzSPY7dk

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.

Ford's core of transformation

[00:00:00] Hello everyone, online and in person. I'm Mrinali, and before I get started, a few housekeeping things. For the next 25 minutes I'm going to be talking a lot and throwing a lot at you. I'm going to try to go slow, so I hope you keep up with me. Otherwise, the room is at a great temperature, so feel free to take that post-lunch nap; I won't be offended. For the last five minutes, or in case we run over time, feel free to connect with me on the UXDX Slack, or LinkedIn, or Instagram, where I'm most available.

[00:00:39] With that said, hi, I'm Mrinali, and in June 2023 I joined Ford as a design director. The team I joined, the digital product design team, was at the forefront of envisioning a huge transformation at Ford. We were reimagining Ford's role as an auto brand, from focusing on the appearance of a vehicle, how it drives, how it feels, how it looks, to broadening out and looking at what it is to own the vehicle. What is the experience of driving the vehicle? What's the experience of being in a vehicle?

[00:01:14] We were going from giving fixed value at the time of sale to giving evolving and changing value based on our customers' changing needs and lifestyles. And instead of having episodic interactions with our customers, during the time of sale or during maintenance and services, we wanted to start having everyday interactions with our customers. We were trying to do that with digital experiences, both in-vehicle and in an app, but we were not there yet.

[00:01:49] J Park [?], our VP, says that we're in the core of transformation. We've gotten really good at building vehicles with amazing fan followings, like Mustangs, Lincolns, Broncos. But in order for us to thrive in the future, we need to realize that the vehicle is a space that customers spend a lot of time in, and with autonomous driving, customers are going to want to do more in these vehicles. So in order for us to thrive in the future, we need to not just build well-connected vehicles but also green and affordable ones.

[00:02:28] He explains this concept of the core of the transformation using a double S curve. The first curve is Ford's existing business, selling gas-engine vehicles to customers, one that has matured and done really well for itself, but it will eventually slow down. And Ford 2.0 represents the new arm, Model e, coming together to build vehicles that are not just static but evolve with our customers. The space you see in between is what we call the core of the transformation.

[00:03:04] This core of the transformation throws new challenges at us. It means we need to rethink our strategies, our ways of working, new team structures and everything else you can imagine. We at Ford are bringing in new leaders and new talent and developing new technologies to break through positively from this core of transformation. We call it founding Ford [?].

My own transformations

[00:03:30] But it wasn't just Ford going through a transformation; I was too. I was a senior designer at Amazon's innovation lab, thriving in a team that had figured out its ways of working, and moving into a new leadership role in a team that was still nascent and figuring out its ways of working. My core of transformation threw challenges at me that I wasn't really used to solving. There were challenges like lack of resources, lack of alignment, changing priorities, all of which were previously solved for me. So in order to thrive in this new role, I had to come up with my own new strategies and understand what my approach has to be in my role as a leader.

[00:04:21] But to make matters worse, that was not the only transformation I was going through. I'd just gone through a major transformation personally. 15 months before, I had become a mom. I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. How many of you are new parents here? Okay, so the few of you here will know that when you have a child, it changes you. It changes the relationship you have with yourself and your body. It changes the relationship you have with your partner, your family, your friends, and your relationship with the world. Really, your perspective on the world changes.

[00:05:03] And so the same skills, approach and processes that I had come up with to become a successful individual contributor, career professional, and even a partner, were just not going to scale in my new role as a mother, or even a wife. My husband and I were, without a doubt, among the most caring, conscientious, sensitive parents. But outside of home, work and chores, we didn't really have time to do the things we wanted. It was exactly the kind of problem that was really hard to solve, and that ends a lot of marriages. We felt disconnected from ourselves, and we tried everything: stress management techniques, time management techniques, outsourcing food prep, you name it. But nothing felt solid, sustainable and sustained.

Reframing our lives: the 60-day reset

[00:06:02] One day when I was working at Amazon and dealing with these ambiguous problems, I had an epiphany. My team dealt with ambiguous problems every day. I dealt with ambiguous problems every day. My and my team's role and mission was to create innovative products and services on a three-to-five-year timeline, so that Amazon always had innovative offerings in its roadmap. When it came to the ambiguous problems that were thrown at us, they were either too broad or too specific, and it was up to us to reframe that problem and scope the project.

[00:06:51] So I thought maybe that's what my husband and I needed: we needed a reframe. So we went from "we never have time for our kids, and we're so disconnected from each other and ourselves" to "how might we design our lives to feel more connected with ourselves, each other and our children?" And if you're wondering, children: we are the crazies that consider our dog our first child. So yes, children. But the how-might-we framing helped us think more creatively about the problem at hand.

[00:07:31] So we ideated and decided we're going to have a reset. What that reset was going to entail was basically us supporting each other to check off tasks from our to-do list that are outside of childcare and work, the life admin things. Then we would spend time understanding what we missed doing or what we want to do. We would also spend time understanding what our vision is, where we want to be, and from there work backwards to create our ideal schedules. When it came to creating our ideal schedules, we knew we wouldn't get it right, so we would go through a tweak, repeat, tweak, repeat process, and reflect on how we could make it better.

[00:08:19] We set aside eight weeks for this, and the designer in me wanted to give it a beautiful name, so we named it the 60-day reset. And then we gave it all our time outside of work, chores and childcare. And honestly, it went really well. The first week, we actually created this list. This is a screenshot of our actual list, guys. We put together all our tasks, we categorized them into us, home, family, we assigned them to each other, we t-shirt sized them. And honestly, it felt better, because we prioritized what was important to each one of us and started checking things off the list, and we already began to feel lighter.

[00:09:10] But come the second week, we lost motivation. We had basically taken away everything from our lives that brought us joy or helped our physical and mental well-being. That included time outdoors, time with friends, and even sleep. So we gave it one more week, but we really just stopped. I was disheartened, I was disappointed. We didn't formally sit down to have a conversation about it, but over the multiple conversations we had over time about what went well and what didn't, we realized that we were trying to do too many things at once. And watching our son walk, we realized we needed to take baby steps, just as he was.

The stop-pivot moment

[00:09:55] What I didn't realize back then was that we had essentially followed a very similar design process to the one we used in the lab. We went from a reframe; we scoped it, we decided we're going to do a reset, and scoped it to a 60-day reset; then we decided to prototype it, the crazy list; and then we reflected and we learned. What we had come across then was what we at the lab call a stop-pivot moment. A stop-pivot moment is when you have new information, whether that's through insights or external, that makes you change the trajectory of your design process. It could mean you go back to a new reframe, it could mean you go back to rescope, change your prototyping approach, or decide that the problem was no longer valid and drop it completely.

[00:10:54] For us, it was the scope. We were trying to do too many things, had dedicated too much time to it, and had taken away time from the things that filled our souls, everything that helped with our mental and physical well-being. So we rescoped and re-prototyped, and reflected and learned. The new approach we took is quick resolution. We decided we were going to tell each other about the issues that are coming up often, and we would spend 15 to 30 minutes trying to resolve each one, whether it's a next step or an outcome. The minute we take the next step, we would learn and reflect and take it from there.

[00:11:37] Now, two and a half years since my child was born, we're not there yet. We are not living our ideal lives, but we're definitely more connected with ourselves and with each other, and we just feel happier. By taking time to talk about our dreams, and check-ins, and where we wanted to be, we realized that we wanted to be more supportive and understanding of who we are outside of being parents. And for things we couldn't find clear solutions to, we took help, and I realized I have ADHD, which brought so much clarity to our relationship. I learned that my husband loves running, and we took out time for his training, and he just ran his second half marathon.

[00:12:27] And for me, I wanted a change, so he took on more childcare duties and I joined Ford. I learned that I also love being on the business side of things, and I want to be able to do a business course and eventually start out on my own someday. I applied to Stanford this summer, and I got through for a course. Thank you. But this wouldn't have happened if we had tried to cram in too many things. This took a while, and slow, small baby-step changes created sustainable and scalable changes in our lives. I love this thing that my yoga teacher says: energy flows where intention goes. By intentionally applying the design thinking process to life's ambiguity, we were able to bring sustained changes to our lives. And this was the start of me using design thinking in areas outside of products and services.

Scaling design thinking at Ford

[00:13:31] Fast forward to my time at Ford, when I was going through my professional transformation. As amazing as it was to be one of the youngest design directors there, I was experiencing major imposter syndrome. I was among these experienced leaders who had probably been leading teams for years, if not decades, and the question "what if I'm not good enough?" haunted me. And the pace at Ford was much faster than I could have ever imagined. On my second day, I was cornered into a room with eight product managers who decided they wanted to throw at me everything they'd done and then tell me how I could help. In a month they went from 8 to 16, and we were still a team of three, including me, having to deliver.

[00:14:26] So I was dealing with extreme ambiguity, and I realized that I had just applied this process, and maybe I could do it here. But intentions weren't enough. If there's one thing that I learned at Amazon, it is that good intentions are not enough; mechanisms work better. So I wondered: maybe this process that I had found some success in could be the mechanism I develop. How might I scale the design thinking process to achieve positive outcomes at work?

[00:15:05] The safety and security team was working on some really compelling products, but they didn't have an understanding of how they would package those products for the customers. They were misaligned on the story they were going to tell their customers, and it seemed like they didn't have a clear vision. To me, as a leader in design, no clear vision means no clear requirements, and no clear requirements means we're going to have a lot of churn and a lot of wasted effort. It was clear after talking to my peers that it was not that we had no vision; we just had multiple visions. We were misaligned on where we wanted to go. Everyone knew we were going to work towards some paid version of the product, but everyone had a different version of what that was going to be.

Adapting SME interviews into a leadership tool

[00:15:59] Because misalignment meant no clear requirements, I knew this was the problem I had to tackle first. So we went into a reframe. We decided we're going to go from "there's no clear vision" to "how might we use the expertise within our team to create a unified vision for safety and security products?" One of the tools that we used at the lab was subject matter expert interviews, or SME interviews. I remember it was for a sustainability project, and we were trying to explore opportunities around how we might improve the product development process of our devices in order to make it more sustainable.

[00:16:45] We carried out one-on-one interviews with industrial designers, sustainability scientists, people from the Second Life program, and everyone at Amazon who influenced the product development process in some way. We learned that there were a few decisions being made upstream that had major consequences downstream. For example, the adhesive that the industrial team decided to use was making it hard for the Second Life program to recycle and successfully break apart the device. So we decided to socialize our insights through a shareable doc highlighting key tensions in the product development process. And instead of presenting it to an audience, we decided we were going to have smaller discussions of two to three people each, so that everyone got a chance to speak, meet people they otherwise wouldn't meet, and work towards a common goal.

[00:17:42] So while I was looking this misalignment problem in the eye, it was clear I needed a tool like the SME interviews. But this was clearly a design research tool. SME interviews are great, but it takes a long while to do them, and I didn't have four months to go through a research project, and I had all these other workstreams I had to deal with. So I had to very quickly understand what the different variables in this design research tool were that I could use as levers to tweak it and make it an alignment or leadership tool.

[00:18:26] So let's see. SME interviews are one-on-one discussions with external subject matter experts to get deep knowledge about their area of expertise. The key uncertainties document was then presented in small groups, so everyone's voices were heard. There you go: four variables. First, I decided I didn't have time for one-on-one interviews, so we would talk to everybody in small groups unless they had deep knowledge about something. And I would go internal first. I decided I wanted to talk to my PMs, because they already had a lot of expertise in this area, and if they referred me to an external team, then I'd go external.

[00:19:10] Then I decided that Ford doesn't have a document culture, so documents wouldn't fly, so I went for slides. And instead of having small group discussions, we decided we'd have a Miro board where I would slap all the slides in, and as I was presenting, people could comment and decide async, and talk to me through other channels apart from the meeting, so that if they couldn't or didn't want to talk, they still had a way to reach me. This led to a quicker and more effective execution of the tool.

[00:19:45] And I realized the missing step in my design thinking process: adapt. Adapting tools, processes and approaches that I already knew as a designer helped me quickly adapt in my role as a leader. So instead of reading books and listening to podcasts on design leadership when I just didn't have the time, I could go in confidently, solving the problems in ways I already knew. Carrying out SME interviews after adapting the research tool into a leadership tool really helped me move quickly and gain tribal knowledge, and more importantly, it helped us clearly identify points of alignment and misalignment.

[00:20:30] There were a lot of great outcomes from this, but I would like to highlight a few. We learned that all of us cared deeply about the customer and that we would always give life-saving features for free. That led to a discussion on guiding principles, and we created a set of guiding principles from which PMs could choose two to three as tenets for their products as they developed them and took the decisions they needed to take. We also realized that there was a marketing team working on packaging and guidelines, and that gave us the foundation of which features would be paid and which free.

[00:21:06] That also helped us realize that marketing and we had very aligned goals, so we had to stop working like a triad and work more like a quartet. Once we started sharing resources and knowledge and working towards common goals, we realized that these SME interviews had led to different outcomes for us, and helped us very quickly understand where we needed to go. This has now become a tool that not just design but also PMs use for alignment, and it has become a very good leadership tool for getting clear requirements to my team quicker.

Lack of resources: rethinking research responsibilities

[00:21:48] Let's take the example of another common leadership problem: lack of resources. Safety and security basically deals with two things: one is preventing bad things from happening, and the second is making sure we're there in the most kind and empathetic way for our customers. Because we're such a small team, we almost never have resources for primary customer data, even though it is my role as a leader to help our PMs empathize with our customers.

[00:22:20] So this area really needed a reframe, from "we don't have resources to carry out research" to "how might we use the resources we have to get primary customer data?" My researcher and I jumped on this opportunity and decided we were going to create customer research 101 sessions. We crowdsourced the curriculum and helped them understand various topics that they could look at async later, and this became a Miro board that 60 PMs use as a great resource.

[00:22:56] But it's not enough to have theoretical knowledge; you need practical guidance. The three PMs I was dealing with directly wanted to do research with 8 to 12 participants each, and we were really resource-strapped for the next three months. So we had to rethink responsibilities. The common design research process requires the researcher to do most of the things up front and then hand off to the designer towards the end, with the PM playing a consulting role. But with PMs having the biggest teams, and us having a really small team, we decided to rethink our responsibilities and let them lead the beginning of the process, and then we take over towards the end.

[00:23:41] Another thing we did was prototype this approach with the smallest research team and then stagger the start of the next few studies, so the next study could learn from the previous one. This helped us get reliable primary research and customer insights from 31 interviews in three months. And if there is one slide that I want you to take a picture of, it's this one. This is the process that's really helped me get out of my core of transformation, break out in a positive way, and be a more confident leader at Ford.

Design-driven leadership and forcing functions

[00:24:17] I want to leave you with this. Something I read in the Designing Your Work Life book, which I highly recommend, is the study by McKinsey that says automation, artificial intelligence and turning everything into software is going to swallow up a lot of jobs, but there will be more work for designers and anyone who applies a creative mindset. That's because there are two skills we apply that are really hard for AI to replicate: creativity and empathy. And those two things are what make us great leaders as well.

[00:24:59] So as AI automates a lot of our processes, how can we use that time and agency to start using design thinking outside of our services and products? How might we exemplify design-driven leadership and help solve problems for our colleagues, our direct reports, our higher-ups, and really start understanding what it takes to develop good products outside of Figma files?

[00:25:25] The last problem you face as a leader is personal growth. Almost always, when we want to do things for ourselves, everything else takes priority over it. How many of you are guilty of deprioritizing personal growth projects? Instead of telling you how I solved for it, I want to leave you with my reframe, so that you can start using design thinking in your leadership journey today: from "I have no time for personal growth projects" to "how can I design my leadership tools and processes to achieve more predictable positive outcomes at work?"

[00:26:05] It's a hard problem to solve, and my little trick for it is using forcing functions. The way I define a forcing function is that it's a thing that helps you do the things so you don't forget to do the things. Make sure that you have a mechanism in place so that there is a deadline for what you want to achieve. That deadline can be signing up for a review, deciding you want to be a guest lecturer at a school, and for me, it is to be a speaker at a conference that helps you build great products. So thank you for being my forcing function.