The Holistic Product Journey: Redefining Design’s Role in Cross-Functional Teams

Christina Goldschmidt at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/QU3jLX0rVIo

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.

Where teams get stuck

[00:00:07] Thank you so much. What a lovely welcome. You could see all of my lovely credentials again. I've been working in the design field for over 25 years, and also at NYU I teach innovation and product management in their business school. I've been working in all kinds of different environments, and as the VP of product design at Warner Music Group, we actually work differently there than I've been able to work anywhere else, and it's been extremely exciting. I've been there for about a year and a half now, and we've been undergoing a digital transformation and have kind of a startup mentality within a big legacy company. And so I'm going to share with you how we do it at Warner today.

[00:00:58] Probably like a lot of you, I go to a lot of meetings. That's probably consistent with many of you. But one of my jobs in those meetings is to hear from my teams and to basically make sure that they are delivering the right outcomes for our customers, and also delivering business value. But a big part of going to those meetings and helping them is to hear their pain points and to help them do that. And so to help them do their best work, I need to listen to them and help them do better.

[00:01:35] But the pain points that I often hear are probably similar ones to those that you hear, which are that they are oftentimes stuck. So they might say things like, oh, the OKRs that we have aren't helping us, or we don't know where we're actually going, or something like, what is our strategy again? And this just results in spin, and it's hard to get going. And asking things like, how long will it take us to get there? And this gets asked by the team as well as by leadership. This is just a symptom that I have seen over and over again. But I think that one of the ways that we deal with it at Warner is to elevate design in the making of the strategy and also in how we deliver.

Design's role in strategy

[00:02:28] Marty Cagan, for those of you that don't know, has tried to tackle this. At Silicon Valley Product Group they have an entire practice of trying to help teams get unstuck, and they talk in all of their books, they have great consulting, multiple books that they sell, a whole media empire, and they talk a lot about how teams need customer-driven product visions. So where are you going in the future for your customer? But also, how do you do insight-driven product strategy? So what are the most important things that we need to deliver right now?

[00:03:08] And that just sounds so easy, right? As leadership, just give this to your teams. And then when you read deeper into their books and hear them talk, and you ask them, well, how do you do this as a leader, how do you deliver this for your team so that you can help them get unstuck, the subtext is, oh, hire a very expensive leadership consultant to help you do this on the ground. So if it was really that easy, I think more teams would be unstuck and would be able to do this. And my hypothesis is that design within the organization can step in and help do this.

[00:03:48] This is my holy grail slide. I think there are probably a good portion of design leaders in the audience, and some of you are saying, I would love to do that, or, I am capable of doing that, I'm helping to drive strategy, helping these teams see what the future vision is, but I don't always have the ability to do so. But I'm very proud to say that this is how we work at Warner and that it feels really good. And so I hope that I can share my tactics and strategies for how we do this so that you can feel those same things. So that you can see what it looks like when your teams know where they're going, where your teams feel much more empowered, where they collaborate much better cross-functionally, and where your stakeholders are also off your back. And so I think when design can step up and hold that position of leadership all across the product delivery cycle, that it can feel really good for the entire organization.

The work: establish your expertise

[00:04:54] So this is my big how-to slide. We're going to spend a little bit of time here, and I'm going to tell you some stories about what it's like at Warner on this slide, and hopefully this will be helpful for you.

[00:05:10] I can't say that I walked into Warner and people just said, here you go, here's your cup, just do this. It was very much assessing the situation and trying to decide how we could help. And I think many designers that I know have that helping mentality: how can I help users? But bringing that idea to, how can I help the team and how can I help everyone at the company, is I think a very critical thing to do. So thinking about starting from the work, the thing that you should be extremely confident in is your ability to do the work. So one of them is, out the gate, establish your expertise.

[00:05:56] When I first joined Warner Music Group, I was given a project within my first month that was to redesign our entire independent distribution system. That's a very large, complicated piece of software. It's how we deliver all of the metadata for every single music release for our independent music business into other businesses like Spotify, Apple Music, that kind of thing. And to redesign that entire piece of software in a month was something that I wasn't sure my team and myself were capable of doing, given that I had just walked in the door, didn't know my team, and didn't really know the music business.

[00:06:45] But I was confident that I could use a design process in order to learn about the music business, to learn from users, to learn from stakeholders, to learn from my team and my cross-functional teammates in order to do that. And so if you are not afraid of the work, not afraid of experimenting and saying what you can and cannot do, and leaning into that work, it actually establishes that you have all of this expertise.

[00:07:16] So we were able to redesign that software, make it look modern, update the UX and solve a bunch of pain points for users, and do that in a month. And then we were able to say, okay, we did this much in a month, now there's a whole bunch of other design debt that we need to keep tackling. And so we were able to parse it out into a road map and keep working on it, and we still work on this product today. But being able to show that quick win, and be fearless and say I'm going to give it a shot, and to use things like design sprints in order to do it, was extremely beneficial. And it established that I and my team were able to do a thing. The team prior to me joining definitely was not undertaking those types of projects at that kind of speed and at that type of quality. So it helped to establish me as a leader, that I could rally them and that we could work cross-functionally in a way that was not possible before.

Fill any gap, and always drive value

[00:08:17] One of the things that I do also with the work is that I'm willing to fill any gap. So that might be that I and my team are willing to step in where there may not be a product manager, or where a product manager might be missing something, or we're willing to talk more technically with engineers about how to get something done, and not just say, oh, that is the product manager's job. And so being willing to actually do the work and not say, oh, that's not my job, also gives us leeway to help the entire life cycle.

[00:08:54] And so yes, it is hard. Yes, on occasion it requires long hours. But when you are willing to do that work and fill the gap, it gives you so much more credibility in your organization, and it gives you empathy, and it also allows you to do much more and to build rapport with your peers.

[00:09:16] And then the last thing I'll say about the work is please, please, please always drive value. Don't do something that is just design for design's sake. Make sure that you are doing something that you know solves for user needs and business value. Please listen, if you're a publicly traded company, to your earnings calls. Know what your CEO's agenda is. We'll talk more about my CEO towards the end of this, but understanding what his motivations were was very critical, and helping to translate that to my team was very critical to help them understand what we were doing and how we needed to do it. And so being always value-driven and impact-driven made sure that the work was quality and perceived well.

Stakeholders: allies, perceptions and permission

[00:10:04] So the next thing I'm going to talk about is stakeholders. When you come into a place, figuring out who your allies are is really important. When you're willing to fill the gaps, you figure out also who your allies are, because you're sort of trading favors, if you will. So working with allies will then help you to know who is going to have your back when you try to go do something, who is going to help you basically do what you need.

[00:10:38] So at Warner we have another group that is product operations, or product solutions, and they are on the ground working with our business partners as their customer. They also in a sense bring some focus on the user, and so they were one of the biggest organizations, and my fellow VP of that organization became one of the biggest people that I had an allyship with and continue to have an allyship with. And so working with him and his team, we're able to do more user research, we're able to understand what needs exist across the larger business and how we can solve problems that are going to drive more value. And so having that allyship gives you more credibility, but also allows you to make choices about where to do the work, because you can't do everything all at once.

[00:11:31] The next thing is overcoming past perceptions. At Warner, being a legacy company, they always had design and tech for a long time before I joined, but the perception was that you weren't going to necessarily get something that was of value if you worked with the previous UX team, or the previous tech team for that matter. And so it's a process of saying, okay, what are your needs, let me understand that, and let me first give you what you're looking for but show you the power of truly doing user-driven product design work that can help you get more. And then, now that I understand your business, let me give you things that you didn't even think about that can help drive your business. And so helping to change perceptions, again through the work and through partnership, is really helpful to win over stakeholders and change what might have been a negative perception. I'm sure you might come into an organization and have a different form of a negative perception, but looking at what it was and trying to figure out how to overcome it is very critical.

[00:12:41] And then, don't ask for permission. So when you're doing these things like filling the gap, trying to provide additional solutions that drive extra value, don't ask. Keep working, keep doing, keep showing. Work in lower fidelity, of course, so that you're not burning extra cycles, but don't ask for permission to do something, because then you can wow someone. Then you can keep showing that you add value. Then you can keep driving. Then you can show that you're a strategic partner. If you stop and ask, people might not understand what you're proposing to do, and because they don't understand, they're going to stop you.

Your team: operations, trust and curation

[00:13:23] All right, let's talk about your team. A really important thing is to establish operations. This is a big shout out to any design ops people in the room, but having operations in order to allow your team to work at scale and repeatably is going to help unlock them so that they can do all of this work with quality and with speed. And a thing that I think is really critical is to loan out your operations capabilities to other teams that may not have the same capabilities. Not every team that I've worked with has product operations, or thinks about operations in the same way. So if you're thinking about operations holistically, and where there are pain points across the entire org that you work with, solving those ultimately helps your team too. So if you're solving those operations problems for your team and then solving them more holistically, you're removing barriers for your team and the team at large. And then you're looked upon as someone who is helpful, and looked upon as someone to go to to help solve problems.

[00:14:36] Empowering your team and building a culture of trust. I'll go deeper into this in a couple of slides, but building a great culture often comes from that age-old practice of distilling design values, using a design process to understand what you need to stand for, what you're trying to deliver. But having those values and really using them, not just having them and putting them in a drawer somewhere, empowers your team and shows them that you trust them to do the work under a set of guidelines that moves the work forward, that you're all aligned, and then that builds trust.

[00:15:16] Deeply investing in the culture of crit also builds trust. When teams can bring work at any stage and not feel ashamed or not feel worried about getting critique, but are excited about it and know that people are going to make their work better, that's when you know you have a team that's focused on trust.

[00:15:38] And then, curate the team. Know that you have the right people in the right roles doing the right things. There can be a sort of negative connotation of getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off of the bus, but you have to have the best possible team in order to deliver the best possible work. And so being honest and open about where people belong and how to do that work is really key.

Communication: show, don't tell, and the paradox of making

[00:16:08] And then, communications. With that work you can show, not just tell. A picture is really worth a thousand words, which is actually two pages in any PRD. And so being able to put a comp, put a prototype in front of people can change their misconceptions of what they were thinking this thing was going to be. And that drives a lot forward.

[00:16:37] And I would say be relentless and tenacious and think about reframing. When I first joined, people were very anti-design systems, and I was shocked, I was surprised. I was like, wait, this is a modern practice that we've been doing for multiple years now, what are you talking about? How are we going to scale? This is how we drive consistency, design systems, this is what we all do, right? But when you're up against the wall against major deadlines, sometimes people are like, well, we'll cut corners and we won't build that for the scale of design systems. And so I was relentless and said, well, my team designs in design systems and we think in design systems and we're going to do it anyway, and we're going to stop calling it design systems because that's a very design-centric set of language, and we're going to start to call it reusable components.

[00:17:40] And it's amazing how when you do that and you try and make it a value statement for your partners, and you just bang against the wall about how good this is for somebody else and it's already there and existing and working, that it works.

[00:17:57] I think when design is trying to be more strategic, they face this paradox of making. There is this idea of, if I make something it's extremely tactical. But one of the things that I learned at Warner is that there is power in the making. That you can control the conversation, that you can bridge the communication gap by making. And so I want to urge you all to not worry about making and think that that takes you away from being strategic. Do it strategically, of course. But putting the right kind of visual in front of a stakeholder or an engineer can solve hours or weeks of miscommunication, and it can paint the vision for someone of the art of the possible and get people excited and bought into what can happen and what can come.

Design visions and our four tactics

[00:18:55] And I was talking previously about design visions. These are our sets of vision ideas for our team. And one of the things that we do with them is that before every crit, a designer has to say which of these principles they are using to make their designs. And so that repetitive nature means that we use them every day, that they have to talk about them every day and show the value in their work related to them.

[00:19:28] Something that is actually pretty funny is this whimsically excellent, that is very, very unique to us at Warner. Because we're in music, we want things to be engaging and fun, but still at a high level of quality. And we use the words of our boss, our president of technology, in order to let him know that we're aligned with him. So he says the word whimsy a lot, and we were like, oh, is whimsy the right word for us? Do we think that we're going to do something whimsical, because it doesn't necessarily feel as sexy as sometimes we want things to feel in music? But we really embraced the word and adopted it, because we wanted to bring him along. We wanted him to see that we were all speaking the same language and on the same mission.

[00:20:15] All right, so there are some tactics that we do, and they are things like design sprints, making vision and sizzle reels, putting prototypes into PRDs, and we just talked about design systems. But the design sprint is our most powerful tool. We use them whenever we can to do fast ideation and to actually bring stakeholders along, and then out of that we will produce great prototypes that help move people along. So these are the four tactics that we use pretty much through every project in order to speed up the work but to bridge those communication gaps.

[00:21:02] And I'm going to go a little bit deeper into them. So for design sprints, because we use them so much, we don't just stick to the standard five-day Google sprint, which is great, but we need a flexible framework. So we've developed jams, workshops and sprints, so that we know that we can do something really quick, something in the middle, and something a little bit more robust. And we have socialized this framework across the entire org, so PMs can do this as well, so that we know that we're using the right technique. And then that way we know that, oh, we can just get a couple of people together and come up with an idea, or we can get the whole team together to come up with an idea.

[00:21:45] And then these visions and prototypes mean everything to us. We're not afraid to market our work, in a sense, and show people what that's like. And I'm going to go through a case study of our product we just launched last week to show you more about this. But they really are our secret weapon.

[00:22:05] So this is the process that we do with all of those deliverables. We conduct those design sprints for fast idea generation. We then socialize them in a vision, either through a sizzle reel or a prototype or even static mocks. And then we turn those mocks around and they are the start of delivery. We can decompose them into deciding what the long-term road map is going to be, and then we use them because we now have a gauge to say, what do we want to do, what do we think matters, in order to set up that road map and help the team all along the way know what's going on.

WMG Pulse: a case study

[00:22:48] So we launched WMG Pulse last week, which is a new app for artists and songwriters. And we started with a design sprint for a couple of days out in Los Angeles with some label executives. And in just a few days we came up with wires for what they thought they needed in order to better communicate with their artists. So these were the wires that came out of just a couple of days of iterating with them. We sent designers out there to hear what they were saying and make mocks on the fly. And then from there we kept talking to other label heads, kept talking to actual artists and songwriters, and turned that into a sizzle reel that we then socialized with the entire company so that people knew where we were going with this product.

[00:23:48] I guess my video is not going to play. Oh, okay. All right, well, I have a five-second video that shows you moving parts, that shows you some of those things.

[00:24:04] And then last week, in less than six months, we launched this product out into the world. It's just in beta now, but it is showing insights on music, audience and money directly to artists. And so we were able to do that same cycle and turn it around, from a design sprint to a vision, in order to launch a product in the world. And that was the fastest that we've been able to launch a real product, with user insights and getting all of our stakeholders on board.

[00:24:45] And so I'm running a little bit short on time, but I want to say that I couldn't have done this without knowing that I was in the right conditions. At WMG I walked into a place that had this mandate for change, and where everything was new, and where there weren't existing workflows, so that I was able to do this. And there was a void in leadership, and so people knew, as I was making changes and that they were landing, that it was going really well.

[00:25:15] And lastly, I would say, in summary, don't be afraid. Just go ahead and do it. Do the work, and make sure that you're showing over telling. That's going to be the real key to drive both strategy and delivery through design. And please feel free to get in touch, and I would love to hear if there's anything you're struggling with, or any of your wonderful wins. Thank you so much.

Q&A

[00:25:44] Host: Thank you, Christina. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Not so fast. Are there questions? Park it right there, we're going to do questions. All right, so I'm going to kind of interpret some of these and put them out to you. I'm really interested in the top item here, which has to do with design philosophies, and where you observed some of the philosophies that you rolled into your work at Warner Music Group. So what some of your influences might have been.

[00:26:21] Christina: Oh gosh. Well, I actually go to quite a lot of conferences, I'm very lucky. And so I really absorb through osmosis. And I'm someone who's dyslexic, so hearing and dialogue with other design leaders has been critical for me, and hearing how other people solve things. And then I would say I just follow a design process of experimentation and trying, and seeing what works and what doesn't work. So I can write a framework slide, right, because I was also in management consulting for a while, so I can really knock one of those out. But the reality is that you've got to fine-tune it over time and try.

[00:27:12] Host: Yeah, absolutely. I particularly enjoyed the design strategy paradox. I felt like that was probably relatable to many of us here in the room. I am curious as to that whole kind of design jam and how you work that into a typical agile kind of working model. What did the integration of those two frameworks look like?

[00:27:41] Christina: Yeah. So I don't think that we follow capital A agile at all. Does anyone? So that means that you're flexible. And a jam you can do in a couple of hours, and you just get a couple of people on a Zoom and say, hey, we need to solve this problem, and what information do we know, and let me pull up a board and let's try to work it out. And so it's taking a break to work faster. And I think that that's what makes it extremely successful.

[00:28:17] Host: Gotcha. And then in terms of success, especially given your experiences in management consulting, there were a couple of questions that came up about how you're managing objections and handling conflict. I don't know what sort of advisement you could give us in two and a half, two minutes on that as an umbrella topic.

[00:28:37] Christina: Yeah. So I have, you could see me at other conferences where I've discussed a design thinking methodology for managing stakeholders. But the net net of it is that I try to deeply use my design practice in order to empathize with the person I am having a conflict with. Understand where they are coming from, understand how they make decisions, and then try to use different forms of rational arguments on them. And sometimes I practice it beforehand, and sometimes I practice with a buddy or two. And I work my best to just try to put myself in their shoes and understand where they're coming from in order to bridge that gap. Negotiation theory also is extremely helpful, understanding how we can get to a win-win, understanding what their walk-away points are and what they're trying to achieve.

[00:29:47] Host: Gotcha. So a combination of sympathy, empathy, compassion and practice.

[00:29:52] Christina: Yeah, that's a nice synthesis. I don't know how I did that, I forgot it already.

[00:29:58] Host: There's tape, so we're fine.

[00:30:01] Christina: Yeah, I guess it's live. Well, yeah.

[00:30:05] Host: Other than asking you about your shoes and your favorite artists. Okay, you know what, it's 26 seconds. Shoes and your favorite artist.

[00:30:13] Christina: My shoes are by Thom Browne, thank you very much. And right now I'm really into Rosé, formerly of Blackpink. Her collaboration APT. with Bruno Mars is just the most catchy thing in the world right now.

[00:30:27] Host: I mean, if that's not a mic drop, I don't know what is. Christina, thank you so much for all your time today. It's been great. Thank you.