Parallel vs Vertical Career Moves

Kevin Lee, Faten Healy, Ashwin Irappa, Catherine Madden at UXDX APAC. Video: https://youtu.be/O9pDI14Xo7g

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.

Introductions: three very different career paths

[00:00:00] Catherine: I'm personally excited about this panel and this topic. It came up when I chatted first with Kevin around his background and his reflection on some phenomenal career moves that he made, that often a lot of people might not be brave enough to make. And I think it's important to look not at the management ladder of moving up the pipeline from design to design and more senior designer, but maybe you should look at pivoting to different roles in different areas of the business. I'm going to jump straight in, because there's a lot to get through. Kevin, because you're on my top left, I'm going to start with you. If you could give us a little background on you and your career to date, in reflection of the topic.

[00:00:51] Kevin: All right, good. Hi everyone, this is Kevin Lee, currently chief product officer at eBay Korea, here in Korea. So, to the point that was made earlier, I was, and I still am I think, a hardcore UX designer. I got educated in UX and I spent my last 18 years or so just in the UX field, in various industries from healthcare to consumer electronics, consumer goods, e-commerce and then payment, and back to e-commerce now as a product person.

[00:01:29] Kevin: So I think today's conversation will be a lot around how you need to not just look upward from your own discipline perspective, which is, nothing wrong with it, but you should take an opportunity when there is one to boldly decide to go lateral, to a different discipline. Because at the end of the day, UX is not a singular discipline responsibility. It's a collection of everyone's. And for me it kind of worked out in the right time, right place, with the right opportunity that requires my skill set and experience to be worked out. But at the same time, from the employer perspective, they also have to look for someone like that that will be benefiting. So it has been mutually agreed and understandable from that sense. Anyway, that's my short introduction. I look forward to talking to other panelists about some stimulating topics that you guys will find interest in.

[00:02:30] Catherine: Yeah. Faten, how about you? So tell us about your brave move to Australia, and from an engineering perspective.

[00:02:39] Faten: Thanks, Catherine. So my story is a bit different than Kevin's, as I studied telecommunication engineering at university, got my master's degree in engineering and programming, then I landed my first job as a developer writing code, C# and .NET, as she was saying in the previous talk. My engineering degree and my passion for technology and software development in general led me to my next role as a mobile software engineer. And from there things changed, as my next career move was to do support for a SharePoint application at that time. I used a lot of my development skills in working as a support engineer, as it helped me a lot in resolving complex customer issues and troubleshooting.

[00:03:29] Faten: And then from support I moved again to a consultancy role, where I was working with QA testers, training them and providing them workshops and training sessions on testing tools. And currently I work as a solutions engineer at GitHub, where I work very closely with the sales team at GitHub, and I work with customers in APAC, from small businesses to enterprises all over APAC.

[00:03:57] Faten: So you can see that my journey is very different, as I started developer, support, consultancy, trainer, solutions engineer. But one common thing between all my different roles is that it's always around the software development life cycle. It's always software development and technology at the heart, at the center of all the different roles that I took. And I like the diversity of what I'm doing right now, and at the same time I feel I can bring a lot from my development skills that I use in my current job as well as in my previous job. So I always used my technical skills, I always brought my authentic knowledge and skills into every single job that I took.

[00:04:46] Faten: But as you can see, it's not all the same, and this is kind of a summary of my career progress. And as I mentioned, it's all around the software development life cycle, and I feel that having that diversity and that knowledge helps me to bring something very different, a different perspective to the table, something new that other people might not have the privilege to have.

[00:05:12] Catherine: Sorry. And yeah, that's really great, Faten. And Ash, can you talk about your move from India to the US and then back to, and then to Singapore? Kind of similar reflection almost to what Kevin has been doing.

[00:05:28] Ashwin: Sure. Thanks for having me, Cathy. A quick introduction of me: I'm Ashwin, I'm the senior director of product for foodpanda Singapore. And I agree with Kevin, right, there's nothing wrong in moving lateral in your own function. My journey: I'm from a middle-class family in India. Like every brown parents, they forced me to become an engineer. Fortunately, I became a good one. And ended up in the US, like every brown kid dreams, right? I was in IBM, typical software consulting services company.

[00:06:06] Ashwin: I have a bit of a funny story about how I moved from engineering to product. Naturally I'm a very curious person. Back in the days, about 16, 17 years ago, engineers were treated as people who just code. They don't need to know the why, right? Here is your task, go code. You have .NET languages, Microsoft TFS. And every time there was a new task given to me I would go and ask my manager, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Why? And everything comes in, I have 100 questions for him.

[00:06:39] Ashwin: So he couldn't take those questions, and he was like, look, there is an opening in the business analytics team where they need an engineer, because they don't understand the engineering point, and naturally you're curious, why not you move there? I was like, hmm, okay, let's try that. So I moved into business analyst. Back in the days, business analyst was the fancy name for product. And when I went to the team I realized the importance of knowing why, because what I was doing was completely different than the why, right? I could not connect what metrics and business impact we are trying to drive from the engineering side. And in the previous session the speaker[?] was saying engineers were not involved in the early discussions and sessions, and so I wasn't that involved.

[00:07:29] Ashwin: And that's how I started my, say, product journey, understanding UX, importance of design, importance of business metrics, how do you engage the customers. And I took a lot of risks in my life without thinking what's going to happen, right? I was in a very safe space of IBM, you know, consulting, job security, and was trying to explore what it means to be in product. So I made a couple of good moves, and some were bad. And in the US I traveled around all of the small startup companies, because startups were just happening there back then. Realized, okay, some are founder-led companies, some don't understand what you want to do. And then Rocket happened to me, where they were starting Zalora in Southeast Asia.

[00:08:19] Ashwin: And that's when my first true learning started as a product guy, because I understood how the business is run, how the product needs to be built for the consumers. And of course being from an engineering background helps to decide how you want to build a software product. And naturally I was with a lot of a diverse set of people, but I learned that there are different ideas coming through which can actually be implemented, which engineers are unaware of. That's been my journey, and I've been in Singapore for seven years, and I'm still learning about the culture, the people, the customers, the product that you build. That's a very, very short and sweet experience of my last 17 years.

[00:09:10] Faten: I can relate a lot, especially that moving from India to US to Singapore. For me it was moving from Lebanon to Australia, and having the same, you know, when you're getting an engineering degree because back home there's more unemployment and you need to be more educated. And then when you first move here, it was easier to write code than having any customer-facing challenges. So that was very similar, I can relate a lot. I've used C#, TFS, old days, but now at least it's all on Git, no more TFS.

Why no single discipline can ship a product

[00:09:49] Catherine: The joys of changes. Yeah, sure. I have a few things to ask around the companies that you've worked for, but I'll ask Kevin first, just because you mentioned something in the beginning around companies need to meet in the middle, and I thought that was a very interesting point. So could you elaborate more on what you meant by that?

[00:10:10] Kevin: Yeah, so first of all I feel a little bad that my intro is very short compared to Faten and Ashwin, so I'll try to catch up here. And I assume that the audience is a mix of, you know, designers and software engineers or product, so I'll just address as a generalist. But when I meant that the companies have to meet halfway, I think we all, as panelists, and especially myself, have been in an interview from an interviewee perspective and also an interviewer perspective, I don't know, probably a thousand times already in my career.

[00:10:50] Kevin: And what you see nowadays, especially as I move from full-time design leader to a full-time now CPO or product leader, is that there are a growing number of companies who start to realize that, as I said before, customer experience isn't necessarily owned by or the responsibility of a chief design officer, which many companies start to have, which means that there's recognition of the importance of it.

[00:11:20] Kevin: But having said that, we all know, and this is something that I always talk about, in order to build a product and ship the product, no single discipline can do it. Right? Designers can at best build a design prototype, validate it, but that's it. They cannot write code like software engineers do. So there's no way that design alone can build a product and ship the product. Let alone product managers, that can build these great use cases, understand customers and translate the business requirements and put a KPI around it. Well, that's it, that's all they can do. And the software engineers, they're the little dangerous people, where they can actually code and they can do some UX around it, but end up building a very bad user experience, because, no offense, but they need to properly understand the user experience of it. So when these three disciplines come together, this is where the magic happens.

[00:12:16] Kevin: From an employer perspective, they used to look at, like Ashwin's case, right, that, oh, great software engineer, great technical background, and doing a product in a leadership role, so why don't you do this? And that's a really large portion of companies doing that trend. And what I've seen recently is that while they're doing it, they start recognizing the lack of truly understanding end-to-end customer experience. And this isn't about how the UI is rendered. This isn't about how a single little piece of widget needs to function, that creates a CTR or CVR or the KPI. This is really about understanding the needs of customers from an end-to-end perspective.

Connecting the customer problem statement to the business KPI

[00:12:58] Kevin: And for my case, I think my biggest takeaway from my own transitioning experience is that, regardless of your product background or engineering background or the design background, you have to have this basic level of customer problem statement to KPI translation. And as Ashwin talked about, I definitely relate to it. It doesn't matter, you can be the greatest designer in the world: if your customer understanding ends up with just pretty pictures, I hate the word by the way, but I have to use it to stimulate the audience, if you end up just pretty pictures, you are nowhere near being a great designer. You're just an artist.

[00:13:43] Kevin: Now, if you're just an engineer who loves to write 10,000 lines of code when someone else can write 20,000 lines of code, great, but it doesn't mean that you are the greatest software engineer. And product managers as well. So I think you have to have this connection between, I know the clear customer problem statement, and I know how this ties to the business KPI, whether it's GMV, whether it's the click rate, whether it's the conversion, whatever that is. Which is really a foreign language to a lot of designers, to be honest, less so for the engineers and the product managers.

[00:14:20] Kevin: This is where you start to get very blurred with your core competency. But often in the past it's been viewed as, don't go there, you want to be a specialist. And there is still a lot of debate about being a generalist being good. But I think it's not about the argument between specialists and generalists. It's just core competency nowadays required by many companies.

[00:14:42] Kevin: So I think my success of making the transition wasn't necessarily about how I have a very good track record as a design leader, but rather, through the work that I've done as a design leader, I always have this connection that I always ask that question, like Ashwin, you were saying. I was asked why, and then I was asked the other way around: why does this great user experience not add up to be a great product launch? And I would try to connect that dot between, and that forced me to understand customer needs to business needs, and those two things aren't necessarily the same thing.

[00:15:19] Kevin: And when you are able to connect that, I think making that lateral move becomes very natural. Not necessarily by your eyes first, but by the employer, because they see, oh, I didn't know that you were able to do this, through the conversation. And that conversation leads you to, would you like to... something that you never expected. But that's where the open door, opportunity for a lot of things that you were just shutting down because you always look for a design-specific career or an engineer-specific career. Which is, you know, not to say that it's wrong, but I think the world's opportunities are much greater than your own discipline, if that's what you're looking to do in your career.

[00:16:00] Catherine: So, Ash, I think you had a similar story to that, from your failure piece on your old boss back in the day when you were in your developer role. I think you could probably add a little to that.

Engineers, designers and the business-versus-customer gap

[00:16:15] Ashwin: Yes, I would agree to that. Those days are gone, right. Back in the days, as I said earlier, engineers were not involved, we didn't know what was happening. But over a period of time this magic has started to happen where engineers have started taking more interest in the business KPIs and how we want to do. And over time they have become so smart to connect the business KPI with the customer KPIs. I deal with it every day.

[00:16:47] Ashwin: And in a very similar way product designers have sort of become half product managers. They are focusing a lot on the customer journeys and customer KPIs. But when they do that discovery work, when they go ahead and ask these questions, we realize that there is a gap between what the business wants to achieve and what the customer wants. And there comes a challenge where, okay, should we focus on customer needs or should we focus on business needs?

[00:17:18] Ashwin: Let's just be honest, right? We all say in all of the fancy interviews we need to focus on the customer. In the end, in the closed-door board meeting, like, look, this is the business metric, we need to drive GMV, we need to drive, I don't know, conversion rate. And we make decisions on behalf of customers. And then that's one spectrum. The other end of the spectrum are people like Steve Jobs, who said customers don't know what they want until you give them what they want. So there are two extremes, and how do you bring these together? It's been a challenge, it's an eternal challenge. And I've learned that a perfect product never exists. It just evolves over a period of time.

[00:17:58] Ashwin: And as I said, I learn every day. We operate in 12 diverse markets, and it's very difficult to build a product which is consumer centric. And now we are in an era where a lot of product designers want to move laterally into product management, because they think that's valuable, and vice versa. And we also have a case where engineers say, look, I enjoy coding, but I think I'm more valuable if I become a designer, and the product. So these organizational moves, people are leaving their core skill set and trying to explore a different function, is exciting, because as Kevin said, that's where magic starts to happen. Because now I have a person who is an engineer but he's a product manager too, and he could create magic. And vice versa with design and product.

The totality of the view: a platform change at eBay Korea

[00:18:51] Kevin: If I just add a few things to what Ashwin said, and I'm going to relate to the software life cycle, or a product life cycle. I think that's a perfect metaphor. Every single stage of those life cycles, you have to have a different skill set. So that's something that we all need to have in our head: no single person or team is more important than the others. They all need to come in at the right place, right time, to work together.

[00:19:20] Kevin: And I'll give you an example. We recently made a massive platform change on one of the flagship e-commerce apps here in eBay Korea. And that required back-end engineers to work together with the front-end, but also the user experience team and the product management team. Here's one point where, Ashwin, you said connecting the dots is very difficult. Now, of course, like any other company, we launched the customer journey map exercise, massive, you know, a couple hundred customer interviews and immersions, all this stuff, we've done it, checkbox, right? You extracted these beautiful insights that almost give you goosebumps, man, if we were to build this way we're going to be winning the market.

[00:20:01] Kevin: And as you go into that development, engineers are coming up with all these reasons why we couldn't do it. It could be platform reasons, it could be just taking too long, we did the wrong t-shirt sizing exercise, or the escalations come up that put you in delay mode. All these things, something that most designers don't understand or do not want to understand, because they're focused on the face value of a UI and UX. But that's not the product, that is just a cover, right? It's almost like the cover for the book. Now, you need to make users open the cover of the book, which doesn't require great UX, but now you have to go into contents. Content has to be rendered at the right speed, because if the loading time is too slow you're going to lose your customers.

[00:20:47] Kevin: So all those things sometimes designers don't have preview to, nor interest to understand that. And then instead they put the blame on software engineers for not doing their job, when in fact they're doing the best they can do to make it happen. And the product manager is being squeezed in between as a translator, getting blame from designers and turning around and telling engineers what to do, and the engineers telling product managers, you know, stop blaming us because you have to write the right use cases to scope it right.

[00:21:16] Kevin: All this stuff. My point is that, to Ashwin's point, it's very important for us to understand that when you have the totality of the view, that's when you are ready for the next job. Not vertically but laterally. Because don't be afraid of having that moment of truth where, oh my god, I am now thinking like a product manager. How dare I ever think like a product manager, I'm a designer. Or vice versa. Embrace that change that organically came up to you, and that's a signal that you need to start to jump. Not up, but jump to the next door, of your other companies that you hope, that you want to make more contribution, because now you're ready. So I just want to share that there's evidence within yourself that tells you, all these times, that you are ready to jump to the lateral, and you are the one who's stopping you from making that. So that's a very important realization.

Why so many people chase the vertical move

[00:22:12] Ashwin: Yeah, just to add on to that, you've touched on parallel and vertical moves. At least in Asia, and in the last seven years of my life in Asia, I've learned that people, regardless of what they want to do, they look for a vertical move. It's an Asian culture where you want to be leading people, you want to be managing people, and they connect that as a sense of pride. It's an Asian culture. I'm not generalizing it, but as far as I understand Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific, that sense of pride, I'm managing such a huge team, et cetera, et cetera. If you run behind excellence, success would follow you, right?

[00:22:55] Ashwin: What these younger generation millennials are trying to do is not learn the art or skill and master that. Rather, they are too focused on just going up the ladder as fast as possible without acquiring that knowledge. And that's very important. As an individual you need to take a step back and see what do you enjoy in your day-to-day life. Is that something that you wake up in the morning and that excites you? That's missing in the majority of the people.

[00:23:29] Ashwin: At least in my team, in my previous companies, at least 95, 98% of the people are looking for that vertical move rather than the lateral move, where they could actually be a good product designer, engineer or a product manager. That's something that's a growing concern for me as an individual, because people are leaving their core skill set, which they are good at, and just running behind success. And they treat success as managing teams, people, fancy titles, and leading the teams.

What else matters: satisfaction, flexibility and expertise

[00:24:03] Faten: Yeah, I just want to add to that. You're 100% right, as fancy titles and salary are the main goals for everyone looking for their next career move. But at the same time, especially with COVID and post-COVID, as you mentioned, being motivated, being happy in what you're doing, that job satisfaction that you get from doing the job, is very important. So you can be really well hired and you can be really good at what you're doing.

[00:24:34] Faten: And there are a few other factors. For me, having the flexibility, having a life balance, these are important factors for me, because with a young family these are extra factors that I look at and take into consideration when I'm thinking about my next career move. It's not just about the job title or the salary. So some people will be like, I want to become a manager and stuff. Sometimes managing other people, it's not made for everyone. It's not something that anyone has the skill set to be doing, dealing with other people and managing and leading teams.

[00:25:13] Faten: And some people might just want to deep dive into one specific topic or domain and become the subject matter expert. And that's fine, because we need their expertise as well, and these are very valuable. I've seen a co-worker who didn't want to get into a management role just because he really likes to stay technical. He really liked to be writing code, and that's what keeps him motivated. And he was trying his best not to get into management roles, even after years of experience, just because he was into coding and more motivated from that side.

[00:25:48] Faten: So I feel like there's no one fit for everyone. Some people might get into management roles, some people might become subject matter experts in specific things. But for me my experience was different, as I mentioned, I took lots of different hats but all around software, and I feel like having that general knowledge about all of the different roles is very valuable, that I can bring that value to the team.

[00:26:15] Catherine: Yeah, I think, Faten, your experience of moving career has been very good. You've used the engineering side when there were language barriers, you've taken a lot of things as opportunities, and I think that's an important one to share with people.

[00:26:30] Faten: Yeah, that's correct. I originally come from Lebanon and then I got my first job in Australia, so coming here at the beginning it was easier for me to just write code, because I wasn't ready to do any customer-facing challenges. And then later on, when I became more comfortable, more confident, I really enjoyed customer-facing experience, and I wanted to do more of that. And as you can see, from support and training and consultancy, they're all roles that need a combination of technical skills plus having the customer experience as well.

Interviewing the interviewer, and why diverse backgrounds matter

[00:27:07] Catherine: Yeah, absolutely. There's just a comment here, not a question, from Sigus[?]: Kevin, we need more leaders like you. And I think that it is a good point, and it sings back to what you were saying about the company's need to take ownership of growing, getting the all-rounded person, I think is what you're all trying to say.

[00:27:31] Kevin: I appreciate the comment, and if I just return the comment with my favor to all of you: sometimes I use this tactic in my own interview process, because again, from a sense of employer perspective, I'm the candidate, so I do have to do interviews. But whenever I do and have an opportunity to do so, I always use that tactic. I ask the people that I'm talking to about their background. This is something that usually they don't talk about, right? They want to know your background, you're the interviewee, you are the interviewer. But I always ask, as the interviewee, so tell me about your background, you know, Mr or Miss X. And then they were stunned at first, because who's asking the question, who?

[00:28:20] Kevin: But I want to know, because I want to know the compatibility. If you are coming from a very diverse background, now I can work with you, right? Of course I don't tell them, but I know in my heart. Because sometimes we look for the face value of a title or the company. There's nothing wrong with that, right? We do need it at some point, to give you the platform to grow, whether vertically or laterally. But at some point, as I call it, you get matured, and that's not the only thing that you're looking for as a pattern.

[00:28:52] Kevin: And I think the way to find out is, in the interview process, where they come from, what kind of track they came into their own role that they are doing now. Because when you are working with people that have a similar thinking pattern, that's really exciting, that's really fun. It doesn't matter if you are the manager or the individual contributor, you're having fun, and I think that's most important at work.

[00:29:18] Kevin: But if you're only looking for face value, you're going to be mostly struggling within a year and you're going to look for a different job, and it's a loss for the company and it's a loss for yourself, because you are not actually learning much other than wasting your time messing around[?]. So I think that's something I would ask everyone to think about: usually you look for your career advancement, but to do it, make sure that you know who you are working with and their backgrounds, because that's something that will give you a silver bullet for what you might be not looking for, even though that may be something that you are tempted to look for.

[00:29:51] Faten: So can I add just one more thing? That's so true, because if everyone, even for the organization, if everyone shares the same background and perspective, they're not going to have the opportunity to be innovative, they're not going to be able to have that unique environment, they're not going to have different opinions. Because different opinions are the ones that are going to lead to new ideas. So diversity is very important. I just wanted to say that, thank you.

[00:30:17] Catherine: Thank you so much. We are literally out of time. I will quickly ask you, if you go to Slack, all three of you, and please write down in one very short sentence what's the key takeaway you want people to take from that, and put that in the Ask the Speakers channel. Thank you to Kevin, Ash and Faten. All three of you are wonderful, and I'll sign off for now.