Design: The Solution or Part of the Problem?

Ricardo Marquez, Pamela Mead, Jeff Chow, Jaime Mariko McFarland at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/ER9C4k-bRpo

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.

Setting up the panel

[00:00:09] Ricardo: All right, thanks everybody for being here, and thank you to the panel participants for being here. I saw some of the feedback saying, "Oh, this is amazing, but what about this?" or "There are conclusions that are not there, I don't understand." This is why we decided to make the talk two parts, and this is the second part. The first part was the provocation, so thank you, Pamela, for sharing these thoughts. I have to confess that Pamela and I have had many wines together, and also other stuff, talking about these issues, because we really care about design.

[00:00:46] Pamela: This morning? You've had a lot of wine together?

[00:00:47] Ricardo: Well, I don't know if we had time, but we had coffee. That's amazing. Like you said, there were many factors and many different topics around what we're trying to answer, which is how design should move forward. To start that conversation, we really appreciate Jaime McFarland, VP and head of design for Airtable, and then Jeff Chow, am I saying it right, Jeff? Chief product and technology officer from Miro. We wanted to have a bit of a conversation from your perspectives and answer some of your questions from different points of view. Like Pamela said, the goal of this is for you to start your own conversation in your context, so we can move forward.

Adapting to the pandemic and AI

[00:01:42] Pamela, Jeff, Jaime, I'm going to ask you a first question, and then I'll jump to some of the questions from the audience. If you don't mind, as we start, just say a couple of words about yourselves and your context right now. We talked about these boom and bust cycles that we've been going through, depending on how long you've been in the industry. I've been in a couple of them myself. Tell us a little bit about this pandemic plus AI boom and bust cycle that we're in the middle of. How has that affected your organization, and how have you and your teams adapted to it? I don't know who would like to start.

[00:02:28] Jaime: Everybody's looking at me. This is a great question, because I've been with Airtable for three years now, so that perfectly encapsulates the two edges that you're talking about. In my time there, I started off with a piece of product design, grew to take over the entire product design organization, and then this year we've made a change to make design a holistic practice, a business practice. Brand design and product design are united under one organization, and we'll talk more about that later.

[00:02:55] But you're asking how our org might have changed during the pandemic side of things and the AI side of things. I think what we've had to do is get really comfortable with being uncomfortable, and it's been a learning process. The pandemic is interesting; it's a forcing function. You have no choice; you have to adapt. I think that was a really good push. We had to quickly learn to communicate and collaborate very differently than we had in the past. There are trappings of studios and time together and sketching that you're so used to, that you're comfortable with. When all that shifts out from under you, what are you going to do?

[00:03:31] I think it's interesting, taking those cross-functional collaboration, design and communication tactics, and now you pull them forward. You might behave differently even if you're in the office again; you've got that under you, and you had to change. So it's interesting to push forward now into the AI era. There's radical change here. It always comes with opportunity. So we're looking at, okay, we need to learn, and we need to identify what those opportunities are, and instead of letting something happen to us, how can we get really proactive about how we want to change and leverage those things? Right now our org is really leaning into it. We're learning everything we can. We're experimenting, because we want to decide, in this moment of radical change, how we would like to shift and incorporate that into our practice.

[00:04:17] Jeff: It's amazing. A little bit of background on me: I've been at Miro for the last year and a half, running product, design and technology as well. Before that I was actually at InVision, so I was the CPO and then ultimately the CEO through that. So disruption is all I do. There's disruption across the board. I actually see the pandemic, AI, and that messy moment in between, as constant wild pendulum swings. I think for teams it's just been massive whiplash. A lot of what I do with the organizations is try to build this muscle around disruption being the new normal. If you're thinking about the next wave of AI, it hasn't even started. The swell is just getting bigger and bigger. There are new inventions every day that melt brains. So it's these little micro-disruptions, and if we aren't stable with unease, then we're not going to be able to move forward.

[00:05:24] A lot of the areas that we're working on at Miro are building that focus on impact, focus on customer value, in a sea of disruption, and staying true to form. Your executives are always going to share with you the next LinkedIn post: "What about this, what about that, what about the other?" That would be my one KPI on disruption: the C-suite sending you LinkedIn posts increases by 10x. So that is the challenge: how do you still stay true to your conviction, true to the problems to solve, true to pushing pace? Because after that pendulum goes through and through, you can look back and say, yeah, we meaningfully moved the ball forward, and that's really what matters.

[00:06:06] Ricardo: We could probably have a whole panel on founder-mode LinkedIn posts.

[00:06:10] Jeff: Exactly. Should we pivot to that? Founder mode.

[00:06:15] Ricardo: All right, how about that? I don't know if you have any...

[00:06:16] Pamela: Yeah. We weathered the pandemic reasonably okay. Of course it affected us significantly, because our business was the business of our merchants, and our merchants couldn't do business. It did lead to some amazing innovations, as we tried to get products out the door within two, three weeks to help our merchants make it through the pandemic. But I think we also got caught up in that hype, the post-pandemic enthusiasm, and grew a bit too fast, and had to really go through the adaptations and the changes, and they're pretty continuous, as we need to figure out how we actually become a very sustainable business.

[00:06:59] Adding into that mix now AI: we've been working with it for quite a while and applying it quite effectively in areas like risk and fraud and customer support and some of the services. And now it's very much the engineering and product development processes where we are starting to apply it and work with it. We've experimented for a while, and we've seen significant improvements even in visual art, in image creation and marketing. So it brings a lot of interesting value, also in areas where we just didn't even think we could be applying it. We're definitely finding it is important for us to engage and try to see how that actually shifts our work going forward.

Design and new metrics for people and planet

[00:07:45] Ricardo: All right. Why don't we take a look at a couple of questions from the audience? We still have 20 minutes, so maybe we can knock a couple of those down, and then I'll come back to my questions. I don't know if you can project the questions from the audience, and if not, I'll bring one of my questions here. Let's see. "What role do you see design playing in creating new metrics that measure people and planet impact, along with the stakeholder profits that business focuses on?" Wow. I know it's a big question. But it is this idea of new metrics.

[00:08:38] Jeff: Look, a lot of where we see it: Miro has many customers across different industries, and we're always curious about the impact that they're trying to have. We have apparel companies that are B Corp companies, and we try to bring our designers to have that, air quotes, seat at the table, to understand that. We try a lot to share the whys of these organizations, so that we're solving true problems. The privilege that we have is that our job is to build a platform that delivers on the KPIs that the business values of the customers, and a lot of the time they are this. Supply chain management; a lot of it is reducing CO2 emissions. Right or wrong, whether they're trying to do that for shareholder value or true purism, we'll see. But ultimately I do think there is an idea of how you do that through design.

Pushing back when designers are let go first

[00:09:44] Ricardo: All right, let's take one more. "How do you push back against designers and researchers being let go before developers?"

[00:09:55] Pamela: It's a tricky question. I've worked at startups in the past that had to really downsize, and I understand that at some point the decision-making becomes: what do you do to keep the lights on and keep the service running, and what are the most essential roles for that? Engineering does tend to be the role that stands out for that. There's always dialogue about decisions that are being made in companies, and you do need to make a case for why a certain role might be important, maybe versus another. But it's trade-offs, it's always trade-offs, and these are tough decisions, and I think most companies don't make them lightly.

[00:10:42] But I also have to say that I've seen, from a business hiring perspective, and this is where the boom comes in a little bit, overenthusiastic hiring. Everybody wants to have a designer, everybody wants to have a design leader, and then when you start to have to downsize, you realize that the proportions aren't quite right. So it's a tough one. But I think it takes a lot of dialogue around what is really important, what's the status of the business, and what is necessary to get it to the next phase.

[00:11:14] Jaime: Something I can add to that one: at Airtable, design is really a business function. It sits side by side with product management, with engineering, with marketing and sales. So when we make decisions, we have to look at the near-term and long-term impact of what that's going to do. This might sound really obvious, but within a product development organization, your ratios are really going to matter. If you clip off areas, suddenly you're left with a glut of something, but you've still got to get to that midterm, long-term impact. When we're talking about businesses that have to make tough decisions, it's still to have a successful business.

[00:11:49] So I think you have to get into the conversation around what it is that we're trying to drive. Even when we make these radical changes, do we have the team we need to make that happen? Who belongs there? Go back to those core ratios and figure out what the work to be done is. It's easy to go back to this: design is very good at thoughtful storytelling, looking at life cycles. Paint a picture of what happens if you don't pay attention to those balances. So a lot of it is making sure you're coming at it from a business perspective, storytelling and advocating. Go side by side with your partners, because you're all in it together at the end of the day. If they're missing something they need to be successful, it's going to be a major miss.

The core designer skill being lost

[00:12:25] Ricardo: This question actually brings in that topic that I wanted to bring. We're talking about the role of design, but what is the root skill, or the core skill, of designers that you think is getting lost the most nowadays? Let me add a little bit to that question. Nowadays we are facing this accelerated automation. You mentioned already storytelling, this narrative type of skill, but what other skills do you think we are missing the most right now?

[00:13:01] Jeff: In my opinion, your presentation was fantastic in highlighting our bias towards impact. At this point a lot of maniacal focus is putting design at the production work level: let's get the pixel-perfect designs to make sure that the engineers can build it, and so on and so forth. What's missing is the softer skills up front, in that ideation process, that are really important. On big initiatives, that would be a painted picture, a vision: where are we going, a north star. That could even be on every project. The skills there are visual collaboration, visual communication, early concepting.

[00:13:49] Designers are very skilled at seeing a bunch of other functions talking in the air, "What about this, what about that?", and it draws chaos. And then all of a sudden we're writing a long PRD, and everyone rolls their eyes. So the idea here is: how do you insert that root skill, the expectation that designers are there to pull teams together and solidify the why of what we're building, so you can visualize it, but without making it feel like the heat of "Oh no, is that the final design?" and getting the crit all of a sudden? It's to further get alignment, convergence, definition, strength. I think that's the hidden skill. When there's an opportunity to bring people together and have that environment, magic happens. When there's not, then developers are like, "Do we have final designs yet?" and everyone rolls their eyes again. So that's where we need to course correct a little bit.

What non-designers can change

[00:14:47] Ricardo: Let me piggyback on that question, for the three of you, talking about the non-design audience: our product managers, our developers, our operations people. What are the things they should be aware of, or the one thing they should change in their process or behavior, to maximize the contribution of a designer?

[00:15:14] Jeff: Being the card-carrying product and engineering representative here, I do think the theme is lowering the heat, and then displacing it. What I mean by that is it's a very high-intensity environment nowadays. Everyone's focused on impact. You're doing more with less. That vibe is coursing through the experience. In that level of intensity, you're not creating an environment to bring the skills of a designer to the places where we need them the most: the early concepting, the visualization. Lowering the heat is also that 99 times out of 100, engineers do not need a pixel-perfect flip book to develop.

[00:16:09] But there's also this idea of saying, "Oh yeah, go for it, we can jam on it while we're ideating," because it's going to happen anyway. There's this weird communication gap right now of placing way too much heat on specific moments, which then forces lengthier crits, lengthier reviews, and that takes away from the more valuable work that's going to happen. So I see that as the biggest thing: lowering the heat. And then I think we have to start building muscle on placing the right candor at the right moments. No designer I've ever seen feels like the victim, by the way. Some of this is just, "Hey, how can I help them better? How can I be part of the conversation earlier?" And designers need feedback. Every situation is different, but they don't get the feedback.

[00:17:03] Pamela: Maybe just to add to this a little bit, because we were talking about this yesterday: the agile waterfall that Rory was talking about has really created some boundaries and barriers that I think we need to overcome. There's a tendency for product and design to work really closely together, because they also get freely grouped together, and then we throw everything over the fence to engineering. Trying to bridge that, and bring back the dialogue really early, I think is what you were talking about. So what's the skill that we've lost a little bit? The sketching. Not moving towards high-fidelity prototypes, but bringing something to the table that looks like it can be critiqued because it isn't finished yet, and inviting others to provide that dialogue together and problem-solve together.

[00:17:54] I think that's both a missing skill that we've lost a little bit and also, to your question, how the different disciplines actually come together. It's not just about bringing design in and how we leverage design more, but also how we leverage engineering a lot more and a lot earlier. So it's bringing that unity together.

Sowing seeds of advocacy

[00:18:13] Jaime: I want to grab a piece of what you're saying, and a bit of what you're saying as well. For our design audience: you should not assume that anybody's going to change. If that's true, then what are you going to do about that? One of the most important things that you can singularly do to help in that situation is to sow those seeds of advocacy, no matter what level you're at. That can be lateral; it can be at the tiniest project level with your engineering and product partners, your marketing partners. That can be upward, with your stakeholders at an executive level. But if you're not investing in growing those advocates, the collaboration's not going to be there. The understanding is not going to be there.

[00:18:54] It's a few different things. If people don't really know what good design is, how are they supposed to value it? So there's the way that you are inviting people into your process, the way that you are communicating. And it's also a two-way street. If you're not understanding where your partners or your business stakeholders are coming from, what they care about and what they're trying to solve, those things can be a real miss. So you have to take the time to really understand and do the translation, do the diplomacy act: here's what I'm doing, and here's why you should care about it.

[00:19:24] Just really grounding and investing; that stuff starts to pay off, because then you have champions that understand where you're coming from. Over time you build that trust and momentum, and they're in your court because they know what you can deliver. It's a really valuable thing, and it sounds so simple, but I think it really starts to solve what you're talking about. You get to better collaboration and impact very quickly. But it's hard to do. It's not a simple thing at all.

[00:19:49] Ricardo: Right. And there was a question about what happens when the bottom influence and the top influence collide. What I find really interesting about your proposal is that that happens with leadership in design as well as with the ICs in the projects. They need to understand those topics. They need to understand that people are not going to get it from the first second.

Parting thoughts

[00:20:10] I know we're at time. I don't know if we have maybe 60 seconds more for any last thoughts, any invitation for the audience to start this journey of improving our design as a practice moving forward.

[00:20:26] Jaime: I saw some questions floating around about AI, so maybe I'll throw this out as a parting thought. It's a time of radical transformation. A lot is changing, and you're going to feel a lot of different ways about that: excited, hesitant, afraid. Technological changes always come with that. So I'd say, when you feel afraid, when you feel skeptical, when you're laughing with your friends about something or mocking it, lean into those times and ask why, and keep unpacking that until you really understand it. And I think you have to go use it. Even if you don't like it, if you don't understand it, if you want to reject it, use it until you understand it, and then you can make that judgment. Unless you really lean into that feeling that's adverse to change, you're just going to be left behind. And if you don't like change, you're really not going to like being irrelevant. So lean into those feelings, find those opportunities, and just keep learning, keep exploring. It's just a tool. Master that tool. That's always been the strength of design, and it's just one more piece in your toolkit.

[00:21:32] Jeff: Real quickly: you as designers are the number one communicators for what is generally the soul of an organization. I think that carries great value in terms of organizing it and bringing along amazing teams of product and engineers to build amazing things. So if you find yourselves on that conveyor belt one day, waking up and saying, "Wait, I'm just building the pixels here," then remember where your north star is, and you have all the permission to switch that back.

[00:22:13] Pamela: I posed three narratives that need to change. I think they are not the only ones. I've read quite a bit from all the articles about whether design is dead or not. So I think it's about engaging in it and finding what is actually relevant for you. One of the comments was that there was no answer in my challenges, and I wasn't intending to give answers, because I think everybody needs to reflect on what is relevant in their business and in their company, and figure out what works in that context. Whatever I could say that has worked for me may not work for you in the company that you're working in.

[00:22:52] So really engaging with understanding what is actually driving the business, understanding what is driving the culture, and then figuring out what it is that you can be doing inside of that, and what you need to be embracing, I think is critical. And also to engage with each other, as we talked about quite a bit: engaging with product, engaging with engineering, because everybody's nervous about what's coming, because we don't really know. But engaging is the key, as Jaime was saying.

[00:23:20] Ricardo: All right. Well, thank you so much. I know it was very lightning round. Thanks for your questions, and thank you so much for coming and staying with us during this conversation. Thank you.